Study: ‘Medicare for all’ projected to cost $32.6 trillion over ten years

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for all” plan would increase government health care spending by $32.6 trillion over 10 years, according to a study by a university-based libertarian policy center.

That’s trillion with a “T.”

The latest plan from the Vermont independent would require historic tax increases as government replaces what employers and consumers now pay for health care, according to the analysis being released Monday by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. It would deliver significant savings on administration and drug costs, but increased demand for care would drive up spending, the analysis found.

Sanders’ plan builds on Medicare, the popular insurance program for seniors. All U.S. residents would be covered with no copays and deductibles for medical services. The insurance industry would be relegated to a minor role.

“Enacting something like ‘Medicare for all’ would be a transformative change in the size of the federal government,” said Charles Blahous, the study’s author. Blahous was a senior economic adviser to former President George W. Bush and a public trustee of Social Security and Medicare during the Obama administration.

Responding to the study, Sanders took aim at the Mercatus Center, which receives funding from the conservative Koch brothers. Koch Industries CEO Charles Koch is on the center’s board.

“If every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all, and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States cannot do the same,” Sanders said in a statement. “This grossly misleading and biased report is the Koch brothers response to the growing support in our country for a ‘Medicare for all’ program.”

Sanders’ office has not done a cost analysis, a spokesman said. However, the Mercatus estimates are within the range of other cost projections for Sanders’ 2016 plan.

Read the rest here.

The Oath and Consecration of the Newly Elected Bishop Methodius

The solemn affirmation of the Orthodox Faith by a newly elected bishop. I don't recall this ceremonial oath before. Perhaps it is unique to the Serbian Church. The English translation is imperfect but you can clearly get the gist of what is being said.

The Great Scandal

I am extremely reluctant to go there, but it is the subject of discussion and debate in the religious blogosphere right now. That being the ongoing fallout from the Cardinal McCarrick affair. The most common questions are who knew what, and when did they know it? And as of right now very few people in positions of authority in the Catholic Church seem to want to address those questions. But the real questions, that are being studiously ignored in the mainstream press/media are, to what extent does the so called "lavender mafia" in the Catholic Church bear responsibility for this? How many other McCarricks are out there, and who is protecting them?

Those seeking a solid, no holds barred discussion of these questions should probably be reading Rod Dreher's blog. He has a lot of background where the subject is the sexual abuse scandals within the RCC and he has sources that either nobody else has or that others are choosing to ignore. A word of caution, this is a spiritually poisonous subject and some of the details are ugly. Proceed with caution.

Food for Thought

Services in Honor of the Royal Passion Bearers of Russia

More than 100,000 marched in a procession from the Church on the Blood in Yekaterinburg to the monastery of the Holy Royal Passion-Bearers outside the city. There followed a moleben in honor of the Royal Passion Bearers and a hierarchical liturgy that night.

Vigil for the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia

Butchered 100 years ago tonight by the Communists.

The Trump Putin Meeting

Some people are using the word "treason" in reference to Trump's behavior. That's an overstatement. But it was way beyond horrible. An American President just stood in front of the world and effectively took the word of a foreign dictator, the leader of an unfriendly power, over the intelligence and security services of his own country. And he did it after blowing off most of our country's friends and questioning our alliances. Oddly Trump reminds me of Tsar Peter III and his bizarre fawning relationship with Frederick II of Prussia. The man is without doubt the most incompetent booby ever to occupy the highest office of the republic.

David Bentley Hart: The Yankees Are a Moral Abomination

I have had my occasional disagreements with Dr. Hart, but all is now forgiven...

Soberly considered, the New York Yankees and their fans present a moral dilemma. Our consciences, naturally abhorring everything abominable, tell us that such things simply ought not exist. And yet we also know that the evil they represent is one we would not really want eradicated. Somehow we depend on it, not because it appeals to some morbid subliminal fascination with the horrific in us, and not even because it teaches us about the world’s deep Darwinian laws, but because it answers to a psychological need.

By exciting in the rest of us that sweet cold loathing that only they induce — that strangely tender malice, at once so delicious and yet so purifying — the Yankees and their followers provide an emotional cleansing. They give us occasion for the discharge of a dark, dangerous passion, but one unburdened by guilt. The detestation that any rational soul spontaneously feels for the Yankees is so innocent, so uncontaminated by spite — just instinctive revulsion before something obscene, like the goat-headed god of the diabolists. And there are few luxuries more gorgeously nourishing than the license to hate with an unclouded conscience.

Yankees fans, of course, never having drunk from those healing springs, typically mistake this hatred for envy, and so for an inverted admiration. But nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, those of us whose teams hail from smaller markets sometimes fall prey to a slightly petulant, even bilious resentment of all that boughten glory — the exorbitant free-agent contracts, the legions of scouts, the colossal television revenues — but who can blame us? And how could we fail to be vexed by the fawning servility of a national media incapable of telling the beautiful from the meretricious?...

Read the rest here.

Baptist claiming trademark on name/image of Elder Arsenie wields law against Orthodox Church

A bizarre legal battle is playing out in Romania right now, as the Romanian Orthodox Church is fighting for the right to use the name and image of Elder Arsenie (Boca), a faithful son of the Church, against a private individual who owns the right to use the elder’s name and image that were trademarked with the European Union Intellectual Property Office.

Elder Arsenie, who reposed in 1989, was one of the great Romanian spiritual fathers of Communist times, and is revered today as a saint, although he has yet to be canonized. Thousands go on pilgrimage annually to his grave at Prislop Moanstery in Silvașu de Sus, and images of him are seen as a blessing.

At least one such image, bought at Prislop Moanstery, began miraculously weeping in May 2015. A miracle is known to occur at his grave as well: Even though the temperatures there can be extremely low, often reaching -5 degrees, all of the flowers that have grown on his grave neither wither nor freeze and die by the extreme temperatures but instead remain in full blossom. From winter to summer, the elder’s grave remains full with blossomed, multi-colored fragrant flowers.

But now those beloved images are being confiscated by the police, Balkan Insight reports.

Police have been called to the monastery twice this year, and also to a shop in the western city of Arad in May. Daniel Gheorge, one of the two owners of the Fr. Arsenie trademark, complained to police that the monastery and shop were selling images of Fr. Arsenie without the proper license.

Through his lawyer, Gheorge has made more than 100 complaints against churches and stores.

Read the rest here.

The bond market is flashing a warning sign on the economy

The U.S. economy is more vibrant than it has been in years, yet the bond market insists a recession could be on the horizon.

Some market pros say that warning from the Treasury yield curve, which has long been viewed as reliable, is not as relevant as it once was because of the long years of central bank easing that has depressed interest rates and turned debt markets into far more placid arenas.

The curve has been getting flatter by the day — meaning short-end interest rates are rising faster than long-term rates, and they are growing closer together. A flattening curve is a warning about economic weakness ahead, but should the curve invert— where the short end yield, like the 2-year, is actually higher than the 10-year—that would be viewed as a very solid recession warning.

On Friday, the gap between the 2-year yield and 10-year yield narrowed to just 25.5 basis points, a new 11-year low.

“The bond market is telling us the [economic recovery] is going to end soon, so let’s price it in with certainty,” said George Goncalves, head of U.S. fixed income rate strategy at Nomura. “They might be right, but they’re too early to call the end of the business cycle. It’s more the fact that it’s flattened so low, and it’s that people are dismissive of this economic recovery…If you look at the facts, why are people jumping on this ‘recession yield curve’ bandwagon when they haven’t given the U.S. economy a chance to see how much it can run? It could show up two years later. Why price it in with such certainty?”

Read the rest here.

Democratic Socialism Is Democratic Doom

A political novice who calls herself a “democratic socialist” wins an unexpected Democratic Party primary victory, and now political taxonomists are racing to explain just what the term means. Here’s my definition: political hemlock for the Democratic Party.

I write, of course, of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s the onetime Bernie Sanders organizer whose victory last month over long-term New York congressman and party boss Joe Crowley is being compared to Tea Partyer Dave Brat’s 2014 primary defeat of the Republican House majority leader, Eric Cantor — a sign of what’s to come, both for the Democratic Party and the country at large.

Well, maybe. It wasn’t long ago — March — that Marine reservist and former federal prosecutor Conor Lamb was feted as the Democratic future for winning a House seat in a Pennsylvania district that Donald Trump had carried by 20 points. The shared secret of Lamb’s and Ocasio-Cortez’s success is that they ran energetic campaigns, reflected the values of the people they sought to represent, and faced lackluster or entitled opponents.

Not every political contest is a battle of ideas. Sometimes it’s just a matter of showing up.

Still, it should be said: “Democratic socialism” is awful as a slogan and catastrophic as a policy. And “social democracy” — a term that better fits the belief of more ordinary liberals who want, say, Medicare for all — is a politically dying force. Democrats who aren’t yet sick of all their losing should feel free to embrace them both.

Start with democratic socialism. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, believe in economies defined by state-owned enterprises and worker-owned cooperatives. Versions of this have been tried to varying degrees before: Israel in its first decades; post-independence India; Sweden in the 1960s and ’70s.

It always led to crisis: hyperinflation for Israel in 1980s; an I.M.F. bailout for India in 1991; a banking meltdown for Sweden in 1992. It’s usually a recipe for corruption: State-owned enterprises such as Pemex in Mexico or Eskom in South Africa are local bywords for graft and mismanagement. It frequently leads to dictatorship. Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist.

Read the rest here.

Mexico — What Went Wrong?

Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . .

Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

Obrador is determined to perpetuate, if not enhance, the asymmetry. In the age of Trump, Obrador also reasons that the furor and hysteria of the American media toward the president represents a majority and a domestic grassroots pushback against the Trump administration — apparently because of Trump’s “restrictionist” view of enforcing existing immigration law. Polls, however, suggest otherwise, despite their notorious embedded anti-Trump bias.

Mexico, the Aggressor

Facts are stubborn and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts. Mexico runs a NAFTA-protected $70 billion trade surplus with the U.S., larger than that of any other single American trade partner (including Japan and Germany) except China. The architects of NAFTA long ago assured Americans that such a trade war would not break out, or that we should not worry over trade imbalances, given the desirability of outsourcing to take advantage of Mexico’s cheaper labor costs.

A supposedly affluent Mexico was supposed to achieve near parity with the U.S., as immigration and trade soon neutralized. Despite Mexico’s economic growth, no such symmetry has followed NAFTA. What did, however, 34 years later, was the establishment of a dysfunctional Mexican state, whose drug cartels all but run the country on the basis of their enormous profits from unfettered dope-running and human-trafficking into the United States. NAFTA certainly did not make Mexico a safer, kinder, and gentler nation.

In addition, Mexican citizens who enter and reside as illegal immigrants in the U.S. are mostly responsible for sending an approximate $30 billion in remittances home to Mexico. That sum has now surpassed oil and tourism as the largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. That huge cash influx is the concrete reality behind Obrador’s otherwise unhinged rhetoric about exercising veto power over U.S. immigration law.

What is also unsaid is that many of the millions of Mexican expatriates in the United States who send remittances home to Mexico are themselves beneficiaries of some sort of U.S. federal, state, or local support that allows them to free up cash to send back to Mexico.

When Obrador urges his fellow citizens to abandon their country and head illegally into the United States, his primary concern is not their general welfare and futures. He seems quite unconcerned that those who send home remittances live in poverty in the United States and seek offsetting subsidies from the U.S. government to find enough disposable income to save the Mexican government from its mostly corrupt self.

Why the U.S. government does not tax remittances and why it does not prohibit foreign nationals on public assistance from sending cash out of the country are some of the stranger phenomena of the entire strange illegal-immigration matrix.

Read the rest here.

On a related note; I talked about this back in 2011. You can read that blog post here.

Cardinal Meuller hits one out of the park

In an exclusive CWR interview, the former prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith discusses tensions over the proposed reception of Holy Communion by Protestants, continued conflicts over the Church’s teaching about ordination, and homosexuality and ideology.

“We are experiencing conversion to the world, instead of to God”

HT: Dr. Tighe

Greek Government to Propose Separation of Church and State

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras intends to initiate the process of separating the Greek Orthodox Church from the Greek state and revising the relevant article of the Greek constitution, reports Russian Athens with reference to the Greek paper Kathimerini. 

According to the Greek publication, within the next month Tsipras will present his plan for the revision of the constitution, including plans to separate the Church from the state, ahead of the expected submission of the SYRIZA proposal to parliament, planned for October.

Tsipras and his advisers are aware that the initiative is likely to cause strong reactions from the Greek Church, although Tsipras believes he will be able to manage the situation. The initiative will be presented as “progressive,” and therefore the prime minister is hoping to receive the support of the centrist party “Movement for Change.” 

The project on the separation of Church and state from SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, was published about a year ago. The project provides:

1. That Church and state discretion are fully established with full respect for the Orthodox Church and its historical role;
2. The explicit fixing of the religious neutrality of the state, recognizing Orthodoxy as an historical religion;
3. The obligation to guarantee a single political oath for president, prime minister, legislators, judges, and other public officials.

The Holy Synod of the Greek Church has opposed the government’s plans to unilaterally separate the Church from the state. The bishops argued that one political part cannot make such a decision, but only with the support of the people. 

Source.

Ex President of Ireland claims baptizing infants is a violation of their human rights

Details.

It's getting real folks. There was a time when I dismissed warnings about a coming persecution as hysteria. I don't anymore. In Australia they just passed a law requiring priests to report any confession of child sex abuse. The general hostility on the part of the secular left to Christianity that goes back decades, is reaching the point of visceral hatred. And in some parts of the world they are in firm control of the state.

The latest claims from the Ukrainian schismatics

Patriarch of Kyiv and All Rus-Ukraine [sic] Filaret claims that after receiving a Tomos on autocephaly from Constantinople, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that  is now in unity with the Russian Orthodox Church will lose the right to be called "Ukrainian."

"It is the Ukrainian Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate and the UAOC (Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church) who will receive the tomos, which will mean the unification of said churches. The Moscow Patriarchate will have to decide: either to join the canonical Ukrainian Church, recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and other churches, or not. We assume that not all parishes, priests and bishops will join the Local Church. No one will force them to do this. However, those who do not join will not have the right to be called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, remaining only the metropolis or exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine," Patriarch Filaret told the parliamentary newspaper, Holos Ukrainy.

He also estimated Ukraine's chances of obtaining the tomos at "99 percent," adding that "the Synod meeting is scheduled to be held in the Constantinople Church in Istanbul in the first half of July."

As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced on April 17 that the heads of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church had decided to officially appeal to Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I for autocephaly. Autocephaly is the status of a hierarchical Christian Church whose head bishop does not report to any higher-ranking bishop (used especially in Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Independent Catholic churches). Autocephaly opens the way for the creation of a united Orthodox church in Ukraine, which will not be subordinate to Moscow.

Ukrainian experts recently explained, and debunked, Russian propaganda's narratives aimed at hindering Ukraine's efforts to gain autocephaly for its church. It was also reported that Russian intelligence could resort to provocations to sow discord.

From here.

I would take this with a grain of salt. That said, there are  a few unbiased sources predicting that Constantinople will in fact grant the tomos. If that happens the Church could shortly be facing the most serious crisis since the Great Schism.

For the record

Cardinal McCarrick, the former Roman Catholic archbishop of DC has been effectively suspended as a result of credible allegations of sexual misconduct. It seems likely that the Catholic Church had at least some warning long ago that he might be a scandal bomb waiting to go off.

In any event we Orthodox should not be patting ourselves on the back as we look down our nose at the Roman Church. It is common knowledge that we have our own "lavender mafia" in some of the jurisdictions in North America. On which note; we need to stop making unmarried diocesan priests bishops. Bishops should be drawn from monasteries, and only monastics with a long and solid reputation. For that matter we should really not be ordaining unmarried men to the priesthood unless they are monks.

Marriage as a Lifetime of Suffering

I would like to commend Fr. Stephen Freeman's latest reflection to readers of this blog. I am not going to excerpt it. Just go here and read it all.

Irish PM Says Catholic Hospitals Will Be Forced to Abort Children

Just weeks after a lopsided, groundbreaking vote struck down Ireland’s constitutional ban on legal abortion, the country’s Taoiseach signaled the broader moral and legal implications of this sea change in a once deeply Catholic nation.

“It will not … be possible for publicly funded hospitals, no matter who their patron or owner is,” Leo Varadkar told the Dáil, “to opt out of providing these necessary services which will be legal in this state once this legislation is passed by the Dáil [the lower house of the Irish legislature] and Seanad [senate].”

Britain’s Catholic Herald reported today that two large hospitals in Dublin are owned by religious orders: the Sisters of Charity’s St Vincent’s Healthcare Group and the Sisters of Mary’s Mater Hospital. Both, along with other Catholic medical institutions, will soon confront the full reality of abortion on demand.

In a June 14 column for National Review entitled, “In Ireland, What’s Legal Is Now Mandatory,” Michael Brendan Doughterty noted that NRO had “predicted in its editorial on the referendum that victory for Repeal would be swiftly followed by attempts to coerce Catholic institutions to provide abortion. Now Varadkar has promised as much.”

At present, the Irish government is preparing legislation to allow abortion on demand for up to 12 weeks of pregnancy — and in special cases, for up to 24 weeks.

Read the rest here.