Para-medical tattoo treatments; European 'No-Go' Zones...more

Obamacare's Slow Death?  ...The results are now clear. The Affordable Care Act has done nothing to unravel the past mistakes that in large measure were (and still are) attributable to excessive regulation and transfer payments. To give but one example, the voluntary coverage supplied by employer plans has dipped sharply from about 60 percent in 1980 to 50 percent in 2010, which on an employment base of 150 million workers translates into a 15 million increase in the number of uninsured persons in the United States.

It would be very difficult indeed to attribute this decline in health care coverage to some hidden form of market failure. What reason is there to think that employers have become more stingy, or employees more indifferent to their health care needs over the last 35 years?

In market settings the usual response to changes in technology and cost is to alter the coverage provisions, the price provisions, or both. Generally, so long as there are gains from trade, these incremental adjustments minimize the loss from adverse developments, and increase the gains from favorable ones. Given the massively improved technologies over the past two generations and an aging population, the proper prediction 30 years ago was that employers should have increased the level of health care coverage, not reduced it.

So we have to look elsewhere for the culprit, and that place is the regulatory state. One key feature of the Affordable Care Act was its ambition. The sign of a good health care plan, we were told, was one that covered all persons from the full range of adverse health events. The new deal was that the state mandates, of which there were hundreds, put to the employer this unhappy choice: either increase the benefit coverage of your plans or exit the markets. The implicit subtext is that employers would choose the former so that reformers could promise an ideal world in which coverage increased while costs remained about constant.

But the actual response proved otherwise. Employees will resist paying for plans that make them pay for a set of benefits that they don’t want to have, whether they be annual tests, annual physicals, or specialized coverage for alcoholism and psychological illnesses. In some cases, the increased costs will not result in coverage termination, but will only reduce the net gains that employers and employees can share from their previous policies. But as the mandates continue to pile on, the logic starts to shift. Now the extra coverage can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, so that both sides now prefer less health care coverage and higher wages, which is what the market has given us for over 30 years...

Abortion Group Colludes with MD County to Close Pregnancy Center  ...Pregnancy care centers have come under attack from city, county, and state officials who, with the support of abortion groups, charge them with false advertising because they do not make it clear that they do not do abortions. Abortion advocates say these centers must make it clear in advertising and signage that they do not offer abortions.

In 2010, Montgomery County passed an ordinance demanding that Centro Tepeyac post signs that they do not have doctors on staff. The ordinance lost three times in court, the last time being March 2014 when a US District Judge wrote that those making charges of misinformation “were universally volunteers from a pro-choice organization sent to investigate” the centers.

LifeSiteNews reports “…unbeknownst to the pubic, Montgomery Country dropped the case after conferring with NARAL. The county stopped defending the law the month after NARAL recommended that very action…”...

Japanese hostage held by Islamic State is a Christian journalist One of the two Japanese hostages taken by Islamic State (IS) in Syria is a baptised Christian who belongs to the United Church of Christ in Japan.

IS is demanding $200m from the Japanese government for the release of Kenji Goto Jogo, a freelance journalist, and Haruna Yukawa, captured last August when fighting with Suqour al-Sham, a Syrian opposition group...

European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction?  ...Fabrice Balanche, a well-known French Islam scholar who teaches at the University of Lyon, recently told Radio Télévision Suisse: "You have territories in France such as Roubaix, such as northern Marseille, where police will not step foot, where the authority of state is completely absent, where mini Islamic states have been formed."

French writer and political journalist Éric Zemmour recently told BFM TV: "There are places in France today, especially in the suburbs, where it is not really in France. Salafi Islamists are Islamizing some neighborhoods and some suburbs. In these neighborhoods, it's not France, it's an Islamic republic." In a separate interview, Zemmour — whose latest book is entitled, "The French Suicide" — says multiculturalism and the reign of politically correct speech is destroying the country.
French politician Franck Guiot wrote that parts of Évry, a township in the southern suburbs of Paris, are no-go zones where police forces cannot go for fear of being attacked. He said that politicians seeking to maintain "social peace" were prohibiting the police from using their weapons to defend themselves...