The Todd Today

This plan seems better than the Democrat option but it still has to much government intervention in the markets!

We can cover more people by making the current insurance tax subsidy more fair.

* By GRACE-MARIE TURNER and JOSEPH R. ANTOS

Republican congressional leaders are finally offering a clear alternative to the health-reform plans being developed by the White House and Democrats in Congress. The goals and the rhetoric of both sides are remarkably similar: cover the uninsured, allow people to keep the coverage they have, provide more choices of affordable health insurance, and rein in health costs. But their policy prescriptions are remarkably different.

Democrats are uniting around proposals to vastly expand federal regulation of health insurance, require everyone to have coverage, and compel employers to provide federally prescribed insurance or pay a new tax. A new Medicare-like insurance plan is still being debated, but even if it doesn’t make the cut, Congress could regulate its way to a government-dominated market.

Four Republicans in Congress — Sens. Tom Coburn (Oklahoma) and Richard Burr (North Carolina) and Reps. Paul Ryan (Wisconsin) and Devin Nunes (California) — will today introduce a bill that moves away from federal centralization. Aptly called the Patients’ Choice Act, it provides a path to universal coverage by redirecting current subsidies for health insurance to individuals. It also provides a new safety net that guarantees access to insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.

The nexus of their plan is redirecting the $300 billion annual tax subsidy for employment-based health insurance to individuals in the form of refundable, advanceable tax credits. Families would get $5,700 a year and individuals $2,300 to buy insurance and invest in Health Savings Accounts.

Low-income Americans would get a supplemental debit card of up to $5,000 to help them purchase insurance and pay out-of-pocket costs. They would have an incentive to spend wisely since up to one-fourth of any unspent money in the accounts could be rolled over to the next year. The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance.

The great majority of Americans with job-based health insurance would see little more than a bookkeeping change with the Patients’ Choice plan. But implicit in the policy is the acknowledgment that our system of tying health insurance to the workplace is not working for upwards of 45 million uninsured Americans.

That’s a pivotal point in the fight over reform: Will the next health-reform bill lock in a system of job-based health insurance or allow more individual choice and portability to fit a 21st century work force?

Democrats are fretting over how to pay for their plans, which early estimates peg at $1.5 trillion or more over 10 years. Economists at a recent Senate Finance Committee roundtable unanimously supported limiting the virtually invisible $300 billion tax subsidy that workers receive when they get health insurance through their employers. Even Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) said he feels like Willie Sutton: Congress must look at redirecting at least some of this huge subsidy because “that’s where the money is.”

This is the same proposal John McCain was criticized for during the 2008 presidential campaign. Television ads by the Obama campaign pounded him for “taxing your health insurance.”

Employers worry that their contributions toward their workers’ health insurance premiums no longer would be recognized as legitimate business expenses. The Republican alternative doesn’t touch that. Whether companies offer their workers compensation in the form of health insurance or cash wages, they still can deduct the full cost.

While many Americans are fed up with private insurance, opinion polls consistently show a majority think government-controlled health care would be worse. There are problems in the private insurance market, and the Republican plan takes steps that can help.

States could provide one-stop insurance shopping through new Health Care Exchanges rather than giving the federal government control, as most Democratic plans would do. And it frees up Medicaid money and provides added resources to the states to target additional help to those with disabilities and low incomes. It also calls for auto-enrollment to expand insurance coverage: People will have many options and opportunities to select insurance, but if they don’t make an active choice they can be automatically enrolled in private policies financed by the tax credit.

Who will control the system? Doctors and patients, or politicians and regulators? That’s the crux of this year’s health-care debate. The Republican proposal makes the choice clear.

Ms. Turner is president of the Galen Institute. Mr. Antos is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

All this talk of the $1 trillion dollar bailout coming down from Obama and the federal government has seemingly everyone in government forgetting about whats happening in this country. We are facing one of the biggest economic crises this country has ever faced due to out of control spending and risky spending because of cheap money provided by the FED’s. Yet in-spite of all of this our local governments are creating wish lists instead of creating cut lists as they should be doing.

I am apart of Eau Claire Wisconsin’s Chamber of Commerce Public Affairs committee. In our last meeting we discussed the wish lists and had a copy of the City of Eau Claire’s wish list. In a city of only 60,000+ people our local government is asking for $70+ million worth of spending in their wish list. This at a time that Wisconsin is facing a $5.4 billion deficit and the City of Eau Claire is facing over a $1 million deficit!

As a Libertarian I believe in smaller government and fiscal responsibility, if we continue to spend then it is only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down. I urge everyone to contact their local municipalities and their state representatives and tell them enough is enough. Also get involved with groups such as the Chippewa Valley Campaign for Liberty www.LibertyWisconsin.com.

This is our money that they are playing with and we should not be creating wish lists in the face of this major economic crisis!

Dear Editor,

In response to “In America people help each other” by Matt Pommer printed in the March 17^th edition of the Baldwin Bulletin.

You are absolutely correct that in America we help each other, that always has been and always will be. I strongly disagree though with the assessment that government has to have a hand in it. To often people confuse the goal of small government to mean that we do not care about our fellow Americans, when in reality exactly the opposite is true.

To see how American people help each other we simply have to look to private charities such as the March of Dimes, the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and the Christians Children’s Fund. These are just a few of the thousands of private charities helping Americans all across this country efficiently and effectively. When government gets involved with charity / welfare the results are much less effective and much more expensive than the worst run private charities, also most of the time corruption, scamming, and scheming ensue.

As a small government advocate I believe strongly in helping our fellow Americans and I know that donating to private charities instead of raising taxes higher and higher will always be the best way we all can help our fellow Americans. When we have a smaller government we all will have much much more money in our pockets available to donate to these private charities!

Todd Welch
Baldwin Village Board Trustee Candidate
www.ToddWelch2009.com

So suddenly you can no longer add or remove new programs because everything is gone in your Add/Remove applications list?  Same thing happened to me and luckily the fix is quite easy.  It seems that the culprit is an installation of Adobe Air, but don’t worry no need to remove Adobe Air and lose all of those cool programs., just follow the simple instructions below:

1. Close all open applications, you can keep this browser window open
2. Open a terminal session (Applications -  Accessories - Terminal)
3. In the terminal type:

   sudo apt-get install gnome-app-install --reinstall

4. Hit enter and watch the gnome-app-install reinstall
5. All done, your Add/Remove Applications list should be working like new!

Let us know in the comments if this worked for you or if you had any issues.

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So today we had a customer bring in a laptop running Windows XP that would not print websites correctly using Internet Explorer 7.  Instead of printing the text and images it would print the HTML code that created the webpage.  After digging around in several forums I was able to put together the following solution.

1. Click start
2. Click Set Program Access and Defaults
3. Most likely Custom is selected, click the down arrows off to the right to expand the field.  Even if custom is not selected do the same for the field that is selected.
4. Under choose a default web browser, select Internet Explorer
5. Then hit Ok

Thats it, now go and try print another website as it should be working fine now.

Let me know in the comments if this works for you.

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Ok so Microsoft definitely does not make it easy to backup Outlook Express when you can boot into Windows so when you can not, well that’s when the following comes in handy.

The first thing you will need to do is hook your hard drive up to another computer or perhaps use BartPE to get access to your hard drive.  The goal here is to get access to your hard drive files.  Outlook Express stores each e-mail folder as a .dbx file.  To back up your outlook emails then you need to copy these files to a CD, flash drive, etc.

Outlook Express keeps the .dbx files in a location called Store Folder.  By default Store Folder is found in “C:\Documents and Settings\(Your User Name)\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{4D2652B7-E489-4302-B4A7-80B37678B194}\Microsoft\Outlook Express”.  Make sure to go into your specific user folder as each user’s emails are stored separately.  Also the numbers in the folder tree may be different.

Next go to your Store Folder and move the .dbx files to a floppy, CD-R, or other removable medium. Once they are saved on a removable medium then you are good to go.

You may also want to backup your address book which by default can be found at “C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\”.  Just copy the entire Address Book folder to a removable medium.

You can now go ahead and reload Microsoft Windows or whatever you would like to do.

To restore your saved e-mail, open Outlook Express and select File, New, Folder. Give the new folder the same name as the one you’re restoring (it’s the archived file’s name, minus the .dbx extension), and press Enter. Click the new, empty folder and close Outlook Express. Now copy the archived.dbx file to your Store Folder. If you named the new folder properly, Windows will ask you to confirm that you want to replace the file; click Yes.  The next time you reenter Outlook Express, your saved e-mail files will be there.

To restore your address book simply go back to “C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\” and paste the address book folder back in.  If you changed your login user name you will have to go into the address book folder and rename the .wab file to your new user name.

Hope this helps, let me know in the comments.

Running a computer repair shop you end up running into things much more than most people.  This issue of Microsoft Windows XP Updates failing has bite us a few times but every time this same fix has done it for us.  Many of the other sites give this answer only after a Windows XP repair but we have found that it works many times even when a repair has not occurred.

So this is the first thing that we alway try, so if you find that Windows Update refuses to install patches it is very possibley because of the following DLL’sfailed to be registered with Windows.  Just follow the instructions below to fix it.

Step 1. Open Notepad (or any text editor).

Step 2. Copy and paste the following command lines into the Notepad window (the /s switch runs the commands silently, freeing you from having to press Enter after each line):

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll

Step 3. Save the file to your desktop, using a .bat or .cmd extension.

Step 4. Double-click the icon of the .bat or .cmd file.

Step 5. A command window will open, run the commands, and then close.

Let us know if this works for you or not in the comments.

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Ran into a very interesting Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 bug today, could not display the menu bar even though we clicked the menu bar option in the tools menu.  After clicking menu bar it put a check next to it in the tool menu meaning that it should have been displayed but it was not.

After searching high and low the fix ended up being very simple.  Simply click tools - toolbars - links which will bring up the links bar.  After that the check mark that was next to menu bar in the tools menu should be gone.  Now just click Tools - Menu Bar and your menu bar should be back, feel free to remove links bar as it is not necessary to keep it on.

This is the first time we have run into this but I would bet that Microsoft will issue a patch for the bug eventually.

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Slipstreaming has become so much easier than it was not to long ago thank to tools such as nLite, Windows Updates Downloader, & WMP11 Slipstreamer.  We have been using this method for quickly reloading desktops and laptops with Windows xp, 2000 and Vista for quite awhile at the shop,  I figured I would write up a post about it for your and our future reference should we forget.

The tool that does most of the work here is nLite, nLite takes all the work that it takes to put together a slipstream disc and automates most of it.  All you have to do is answer the prompts that come up as you work through the wizards.  For a list of all the features go to http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html .   A couple big things that we love about nLite are that you can add any drivers you would like to the OS install CD as well as its ability to incorporate all the updates from Windows update onto your install disc, and that where the Windows Updates Downloader comes into play.

Windows Updates Downloader is one of the greatest time savers you can find, it takes all the work out of hunting down every windows update you could ever need.  You simply download the program and then download the url list that corresponds to the version of Windows that you wish to install, select the updates you want, hit continue and bam, you have more updates than you know what to do with.

Finally the last tool is optional but if you want to slipstream Windows Media Player 11 then you will need it.  WMP11 Slipstreamer once installed is automatically used by nLite to slipstream WMP 11 onto your Windows install CD.  No need to do any customization of this tool as it works out of the box just fine.

One last things to note is that not all updates will slipstream so during the build process of nLite you will get errors but fear not just coninue on and you will have a nice slipstream disc in no time.  If you need help at anytime referr to the forums on each products site as they seem to be very helpfull in our experience.

Hope this helps someone!

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On Fridays episode of WEAU’s Technology Sport is a segment of myself doing a custom computer build , check it out and let me know what you think in the comments: http://tinyurl.com/4akz2a