Did You Know?

Here are a few facts about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) gleaned from a Wall Street Journal article written by Heather Higgins and Hadley Heath:

• Americans know that ObamaCare requires insurance companies to allow families to keep adult children up to age 26 on their parents' policy. They are less likely to know that the provision increased the average family premium—even for families that didn't add adult dependents—by $150-$450 in 2011.
• The average family's health-insurance premiums are already up $1,300.
• Young workers who buy their own insurance will see a 19%-30% increase in premiums as a result of ObamaCare.
• Remember the 700,000 people whom the Congressional Budget Office predicted would make use of ObamaCare's federal high-risk program? Just 78,000 people have enrolled. As a result, each person in the program costs taxpayers millions of allocated dollars. Americans, when they hear this, know instinctively that there must be a better way to address the problem.
• ObamaCare was sold as the solution to covering the 47 million uninsured in America, but 10 years after the law is implemented, 30 million Americans will still be uninsured. What problem, exactly, is ObamaCare solving again?
• Americans are also generally familiar with Medicaid's problems, among them the refusal by many doctors to accept Medicaid patients. What most people don't know is that approximately 10 million of those who gain insurance under ObamaCare will just be dumped into the already cash-strapped Medicaid system.

There's a lot more information on the Health Reform law at this site. You read this stuff and you can understand why the GOP wants to rescind much of it. It looks like there was no more preparation put into it than was put into Mr. Obama's debate appearance Wednesday night.

Child Abuse

Good teachers across the country are deeply concerned that their standing in the public's esteem has been declining for several decades. This is unfortunate because there are so many outstanding people working with our kids in their schools, but what the public often sees are the ones who have no business being in the classroom. Like this woman at Philadelphia's Charles Carroll High School who apparently missed the in-service program on teaching tolerance and respect for young people:

A Philadelphia high school that normally requires students to wear uniforms initiated a casual dress day on Wednesday. But for one student at Charles Carroll High School, the opportunity to dress down was accompanied by a public dressing down, station KSDK reports.

Samantha Pawlucy, a sophomore, came to school clad in a Romney-Ryan T-shirt. The day passed without incident until she arrived at her geometry class. Her teacher, who is black, became so exercised at the sight of the shirt that she ordered the 16-year-old out of her classroom. When Samantha refused to leave, the teacher told her to remove the shirt, demanding to know whether her parents were (cover your ears) “R*p*blican.” She explained that Carroll High is a “Democratic school” and that wearing a Republican shirt is in her view akin to wearing a KKK shirt.

Still not satisfied that this important lesson had taken, the teacher marched Samantha out into the hallway, where she urged other teachers and students to mock her for her impertinence.

“I was really embarrassed and shocked,” the teen is quoted as saying. “I didn’t think she’d go in the hallway and scream to everyone.”

Samantha told reporters that she had decided to wear the shirt after researching the two major party candidates for president and concluding that she liked Romney’s message better. Her father, Richard Pawlucy, said she was especially interested in Romney’s opposition to partial-birth abortion.

When teachers lament that their communities are losing respect for them, when they complain that they're not being treated like professionals, maybe they should ask themselves why their unions protect numbskulls who think that a publicly funded school is a "Democratic" school, who seek to impose their beliefs by bullying and humiliating their students, and who extol diversity in race, gender and sexual orientation, but not in political opinions.

Unless there's a lot more to this story than what's at the link, this woman should be fired. Whatever she is she's not a teacher.

The article reminds us that neither is this woman an isolated example. There was, for instance, the teacher in North Carolina last spring who demanded that her students stop speaking ill of Mr. Obama and threatened them with arrest if they didn't.

Schools used to have standards that prospective teachers had to meet before they were placed in a classroom. Apparently, nowadays they let almost anyone do the job. With so many young, qualified people with IQs well above normal looking in vain for teaching positions, why do we inflict people like these on our kids? It's a form of child abuse.