Daily Archives: June 27, 2017

Lighthouse Church offering free food – Your Daily Globe.com

Posted: June 27, 2017 at 7:10 am

By RALPH ANSAMI

ransami@yourdailyglobe.com

Ironwood - For the second straight year, a Feed the Hungry van arrived Monday to bring 21,000 pounds of food to the Lighthouse Faith Center Church on Ironwood's Ayer Street.

Pastor Tom Rouse said the free food products will be distributed to the needy on the Gogebic Range on Thursday from 5 to 8 p.m.

"Whoever comes, comes," he said of the would-be recipients.

Rouse said from his conversations with area food shelter operators, like the Union Station pantry, the need is as great or greater than ever for the food supplements on the Gogebic Range.

The semi-truck and trailer arrived for unloading on a rainy, cold Monday morning from "Feed the Hungry," of South Bend, Ind., and there were about a dozen volunteers on hand to help out.

Forslund Building Supply of Ironwood offered a forklift for the church to use to remove the large boxes from the truck.

Rouse said some of the food items were to be transported to the companion church in Calumet.

Included in the food items are sausages, oatmeal, apple juice, granola bars and cereal.

The church has been feeding hungry people in Africa for more than a decade. "We've fed 43,000 people in Africa," Rouse said.

The food distribution here is available to anyone in need. They should bring bags or boxes for the food.

The church is at 777 E. Ayer St., near the high school baseball field.

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It’s 10 years today since the last Labour leader to win a general election quit as PM – WalesOnline

Posted: at 7:10 am

The last Labour leader to win a general election resigned as Prime Minister 10 years ago today.

Tony Blair took his final session of Prime Ministers Questions at the despatch box and said: I wish everyone, friend or foe, well and that is that, the end.

A decade on, its clear this was more than the end of a premiership. It was the end of a political age that is radically different to the one we inhabit today.

Gordon Brown had spent years dreaming of how he would lead Britain from No 10 but the financial crash and the mission to rescue the economy defined his tenure. David Cameron and Nick Clegg presided over austerity measures and Theresa May now hopes to oversee Britains departure from the European Union this is not the future Mr Blair will have wanted for Britain.

It would be fascinating if he allowed a team of scientists to attach sensors to him to measure whether he gets more riled by the prospect of Brexit or the sight of Jeremy Corbyn leading the Labour party.

Its doubtful whether Mr Blair will spend much time today thinking back to his final hours in Downing St. One of the traits of true political animals is that they rarely engage in self-analysis and much prefer to pound forward.

There is clear evidence the triple election-winner wants to stage another great disruption in politics, and not just in the UK.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is advertising for a managing editor to take forward its key messages, one of which is that there is an urgent need for a new agenda to provide radical but sensible answers to challenges including the rise of a false populism.

This populism, according to the institute, represents a convergence of the political left and right around isolationism and protectionism.

Whether it is President Trump trashing trade deals or Ukip championing Brexit, Mr Blairs vision for the world is being challenged on multiple fronts. He wants to fight back.

He plans to use his institute to revitalise the centre ground through a corpus of new thinking.

This zeal to shape the future contrasts with how George Bush spends his time. The ex-President does a lot of painting and is winning steadily more positive praise for his portraits.

Mr Blair is not looking for a hobby. The question is how big a bang he wants to make.

This ardent pro-European once looked destined to lead the campaign to take Britain into the euro. Instead, he is now watching the Tories David Davis helm Brexit negotiations.

Mr Blair persuaded Labour to abandon its commitment to nationalisation ahead of his first landslide election victory but admirers of Marx now hold positions of power at the top of the party.

He must look around for younger talent who could champion the type of policies he put at the centre of his reform agenda in the pre-Iraq years. Mr Blair wanted to harness the energy and resources of the best of the private sector for the common good.

He shredded socialist orthodoxy and fought for foundation hospitals, academy schools and even introduced tuition fees to get cash into the university sector. It is still remarkable that a party that had been led by Michael Foot as recently as 1983 went on this neoliberal adventure.

Welsh Labour distanced itself from such policies with its decision to let clear red water flow between Cardiff and London. But during the recent election campaign Mr Corbyns Labour shadow cabinet looked to the left of the Welsh Government.

If Mr Blair wants inspiration he may gaze across the Channel and marvel at how Emmanuel Macron quickly founded a proudly pro-EU party, trounced the National Front, won the presidency and then saw his supporters storm parliament.

His institute exists to support those in the active front line of politics but he may struggle to find a British Macron around Westminster.

David Miliband has become New Labours prince across the water. From his base in New York he leads the International Rescue Committee, one of the worlds most respected refugee agencies.

What would happen if Mr Blair gave his old aide a call and urged him to come back across the Atlantic and start a new party of radical centrism?

It would not take long to raise the cash to start a pro-business party that sees a key role for the private sector in helping the NHS and social services meet the challenge of caring for an ageing population. The real cost would be a psychological one.

Britains remaining Blairites may loath what has happened to their party but when they were at the helm they never thought they were betraying Keir Hardie or Aneurin Bevan. Rather, they believed they were taking forward Labours finest values and using the power of prosperity to advance redistribution and an opportunity revolution.

Activists throughout the different factions of the Labour family see their party as one of the greatest engines for social progress Britain, and the world, has ever known. It is one thing to fight to reclaim the party it is quite another to try and replace it.

Mr Blair, a maestro of political marketing must also understand that he is among the most divisive figures in UK politics. If he does want to help a new movement transform the zeitgeist, one of the best things he can do is stay in the background.

And if he does find himself once more at the centre of national attention, it is easy to imagine his old ally Peter Mandelson whispering some sage advice in his ear before a TV interview: Dont call it a comeback.

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Finance officials to reapply for jobs – Namibian

Posted: at 7:08 am

News - National | 2017-06-27Page no: 1 byShinovene Immanuel

Finance minister Calle Schlettwein

OVER 1 380 finance ministry officials will be required to reapply for their jobs when the proposed state-owned Namibia Revenue Agency is formed.

Finance minister Calle Schlettwein tabled the Namibia Revenue Agency Bill 2017 to pave the way for the creation of the independent agency which will assess and collect taxes.

The agency will not only extract the largest part of the finance ministry's workforce, but a proposed law tabled last week suggests that the new parastatal should be allowed to attract experts by paying more than what other civil servants currently earn.

When he tabled the proposed bill in the National Assembly last week, Schlettwein said 730 officials from the Inland Revenue department and 650 from the directorate of customs will have to reapply for their jobs when the new agency opens next year.

According to Schlettwein, the two departments make up 79% of the total staff at the finance ministry.

Schlettwein told The Namibian yesterday that the finance ministry has a total workforce of 1 740, but the two departments have up to 1 380 workers.

To further avoid compromising on the skills needed for the agency, there will be no automatic transfer of existing staff of the departments of Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise to the new institution, the minister stated.

However, finance officials will be offered the first opportunity to apply and compete for jobs offered at the new agency before the platform is opened up to the public, he said.

As such, arrangements will be made to ensure that the selection process is transparent and adheres to best practices, Schlettwein added.

According to the minister, officials at the finance ministry who fail to get jobs at the new tax agency will be offered positions elsewhere in government, as stipulated in the Public Service Act.

He said some officials at the agency will also be highly paid in order to attract the best talent.

The agency will be exempted from the public service rules and public enterprises remuneration guidelines, he noted.

The 2017/18 budget documents indicate that the finance ministry will spend N$28 million on salaries and other benefits. Schlettwein said the new parastatal will start working next year at a date yet to be announced, adding that there is a need to manage the transition process well to avoid making costly mistakes.

He said for now, a finance ministry and revenue agency task team will finalise the transitional aspects for the establishment of the agency.

This entails further consultations on the operational modalities, the determination of the recruitment process, and proposals for the draft internal policies of the new institution in preparation for the recruitment of the board and senior management of the agency, Schlettwein stated.

The minister said one of the functions of setting up a highly-paying tax body is to catch companies and individuals who are taking advantage of loopholes to avoid paying taxes.

We are a resource-based economy, which comes with the potential for illicit financial flows, transfer pricing, profit shifting and other base-eroding tax planning activities, he said.

Illicit financial flows involve money illegally earned, transferred or used which crosses national borders. Culprits are usually multinational companies and criminals.

The minister said tackling illicit financial flows will require specialised skills, which could not be optimised in the public service due to a lack of skills.

Tackling illicit financial flows will give President Hage Geingob's administration plaudits for tackling corporate and financial cheating.

The real impact of illicit financial flows on Namibia is currently not known, as the government continues to rely on international statistics when commenting on the subject.

For instance, the United States-based think tank, Global Financial Integrity, said in its 2012 report that Namibia lost around N$5,6 billion per year to illegal activities between 2001 to 2010.

The Namibia Revenue Agency will be run by a seven-member board on a three-year term. The board members will be appointed by the minister from experts selected from state entities, such as the permanent secretary from the finance ministry, the commissioner, and five members who will be appointed based on areas of expertise such as taxation, law, auditing and human resources.

A commissioner will be appointed as the chief executive for five years. The chief executive can only serve for a maximum two terms (10 years), but his/her second-term appointment should be based on excellence in performance, and at the discretion of the finance minister.

Labour expert Herbert Jauch told The Namibian yesterday that the government will have to renegotiate with the trade unions to which those officials whose working conditions are set to be changed, belong. He said there was a similar case several years ago when officials from the ministry of works were told to join the Roads Authority.

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Pearl Automation, Founded by Apple Veterans, Shuts Down – The … – New York Times

Posted: at 7:07 am

The company had raised about $50 million from investors, including Venrock, Accel and Shasta Ventures, but it needed several hundred million dollars more to develop the market for its rear-facing camera, as well as a forward-facing camera that was in development. With about 75 employees, about 50 of whom had worked at Apple, the company was burning through cash at a rate that venture investors were unwilling to continue funding without a clear path to a hit product.

It was an ambitious and risky proposition from the beginning, with some great vision to try to revolutionize the automotive aftermarket, said David Pakman, a partner at Venrock who oversaw the Pearl investment. They are extraordinary product people, but none of us understood the market correctly.

Pearls failure was first reported by Axios.

Mr. Gardner said that Pearl held talks with several potential acquirers in the automotive industry but could not reach an agreement. It did find a company, American Road Products, to take over its RearVision backup camera so current customers will not be left in the lurch.

While the company has failed, its employees are already fielding job offers. Brian Latimer, a program manager at Pearl who had previously worked at Apple, said that the employees liked working as a team and that some of them were trying to sell themselves as a package to a new employer.

Were trying to keep the band together, he said. Were incredibly effective.

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Rising Inequality May Be the Real Risk of Automation – Bloomberg

Posted: at 7:07 am

Technological change has had more impact on earnings distribution than on demand for workers, study finds

June 27, 2017, 4:32 AM EDT

If your main worry over automation is losing your job, history suggests youll probably be just fine.

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After all, evena centuryof unprecedented technological advancement in transportation, production and communication hasnt caused labors share of national income to significantly budge.Economists David Autor and Anna Salomons reckon thats because the primary driver of employment has actually been population growth, despite all the emphasis placed in academic circles on howmachines augment human labor as well as why they will ultimately replace us anyway.

The bigger concern, they say, is how technological advances will affect earnings distribution.

Essentially, the argument that the duo puts forth is that as long as there have been humans, there have been jobs a topic Autor, who works at the MIT Department of Economics, previously exploredin a Ted Talk. Theysuggest that labor supply and final demand for goods and services are what actually determine the level of employment, as consuming workers have more and more needs.

Source: David Autor, Anna Salomons

Autors research together with Salomons, who works at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, will be presented Tuesday to central bankers from around the world atthe European Central Banks forum in Sintra, Portugal.

What has changed as a consequence of greater productivity throughtechnological advances is how jobs are remunerated.

Although the raw count of jobs availablein industrialized countries is roughly keeping pace with population growth, the economists write, many of the new jobs generated by an increasingly automated economy do not offer a stable, sustainable standard of living.

Simultaneously, many highly-paid occupations that are strongly complemented by advancing automation are out of reach to workers without a college education.

So if the problem isnt falling aggregate labor demand, but rather an increasingly skewed distribution of employment and ultimately earnings humans may need to re-direct the focus of what technology will mean for the future of work.

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NSW GovDC eyes process automation in inter-government service delivery – ZDNet

Posted: at 7:07 am

The New South Wales government is looking into process automation for reducing response times in its datacentres, with director for GovDC Derek Paterson highlighting artificial intelligence (AI) as a way of delivering better services to its customers.

Speaking at the opening of enterprise cloud company ServiceNow's new Australian headquarters in Sydney last week, Paterson said he is looking for opportunities to automate processes that tend to take too long by removing the human element.

"How do I remove the human intervention there? There could have been something manual in regards to paper management, let's make that electronic, let's pack that into a form, let's just hook into another API," he explained.

"There is so much duplication when you do talk about organisations that have a long tenure. This gives you an opportunity to look at your end-to-end processes, inventories, and catalogues for example -- it gives you the opportunity to say, 'Well that's redundant, we don't need that anymore -- that's where the data comes from and that's where the opportunities come from," he added.

GovDC uses a ServiceNow-powered portal and service catalogue, hoping to boost public sector performance and efficiency. According to Paterson, such improvements come primarily through having less human intervention and more automation.

"Consider where the world is going to and the amount of data captured that can be processed and analysed using anything from AI to machine learning. Then imagine what you can do with that data," he said.

"To be able to pick trends around who is doing what and when they're doing it -- can we do it quicker? Can it make itself do it quicker? That's the world I want to be in."

Paterson also said exposing APIs between different technology vendors and products allows for that unification of end-to-end system implementations,

"Getting a tool like this that we've been using, gives us the opportunity to have a cohesive approach as a number of government departments that we work with are using something that an API can get hooked into," he added.

"It's not just on the platform point of view, it's actually on some of the technologies as well, so if you go into the public cloud there's an API for orchestration, if we want to move into a vendor world there's another API for that."

GovDC was officially launched in October 2013 to enable the consolidation of 130 government datacentres into two, with all state government agencies required to move into or migrate its IT into GovDC by August 2017.

The GovDC Marketplace launched in parallel to provide NSW agencies with a one-stop-shop for finding telecommunications, cloud, infrastructure, managed services, and software providers.

It was touted as a way of having IT services "readily available, on-tap, and as-a-service", rather than the traditional approach of buying hardware and software. The government also saw it as a way to give access to services some agencies previously could not afford.

The state government said previously the motivation behind shifting to the GovDC model was that at previous sites, back-up and disaster recovery systems were sometimes non-existent.

"Demand was growing at an unprecedented rate, chief information officers were entering contracts which included unused capacity to ensure continuity of expansion, contractual conditions were problematic, and risk allocation unfair, which resulted in hidden costs and risks to the state," the government said.

"No existing facility could meet projected government demand over the 15 years."

The state government said it experienced an overriding benefit by entering into a whole-of-government arrangement to minimise total costs, make contractual terms and costs more transparent, and guarantee reliability and service standards.

"Our priority is driving digital innovation to improve access to services for the citizens of NSW," Paterson said previously.

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Despite Democrats’ continued hyperbole, the Republicans’ Medicaid reform is not unreasonable. – National Review

Posted: at 7:07 am

The Brezhnev Doctrine said that the Soviet empire could only expand and never give back its gains. A domestic version of the doctrine has long applied to the welfare state and never so brazenly as in the debate over the Republican health-care bill.

Its reforms to Medicaid are portrayed as provisions to all but forcibly expel the elderly from nursing homes and send poor children to the workhouse. Bernie Sanders has called the bill barbaric, a word that once was reserved for, say, chattel slavery or suttee, but is now considered appropriate for a change in the Medicaid funding formula.

The Republican health bills have two major elements on Medicaid: rolling back the enhanced funding for the Obama Medicaid expansion, and over time instituting a new per capita funding formula for the program. The horror.

The Democrats now make it sound as if the Obama expansion is part of the warp and woof of Medicaid. In fact, it was a departure from the norm in the program, which since its inception has been, quite reasonably, limited to poor children, pregnant women, the disabled, and the ailing elderly. Obamacare changed it to make a priority of covering able-bodied adults.

Obamacare originally required states to enroll able-bodied adults with incomes less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line starting in 2014. The Supreme Court rewrote the law to make the expansion voluntary, and 31 states and the District of Columbia took it up.

Traditionally, the federal government had paid more to poor than rich states, with a match ranging from 75 percent for the poorest state, Mississippi, to 50 percent for the rich states. Obamacare created an entirely new formula for the Medicaid expansion population. It offered a 100 percent federal match for the new enrollees, gradually declining to a 90 percent match supposedly, forever.

So, perversely, Obamacare has a more generous federal match for the able-bodied enrollees in Medicaid than for its more vulnerable populations.

This higher federal matching rate, writes health-care analyst Doug Badger, allows states to leverage more federal money per state dollar spent on a nondisabled adult with $15,000 in earnings than on a part-time minimum wage worker with developmental disabilities who earns barely half that amount. According to Badger, West Virginia received seven times as much federal money for spending $1 on an able-bodied adult than for spending $1 on a disabled person.

This obviously makes no sense, and the Senate health-care bill phases out the enhanced funding over several years. But it doesnt end the expanded Medicaid eligibility for the able-bodied. And a refundable tax credit will be available for low-income people that is meant to pick up any slack from Medicaid. This is hardly Social Darwinism.

The other, longer-term change in the House and Senate bills is moving to a per capita funding formula for Medicaid, with the Senate bill ratcheting the formula down to a per capita rate pegged toinflation in 2025. Maybe this will prove too stringent, but it used to be a matter of bipartisan consensus that the current structure of Medicaid creates an incentive for heedless growth in the program.

The way it works now, Mississippi, for instance, gets nearly $3 from the federal government for every $1 it spends. Why ever economize? In the 1990s, the Clinton administration advanced what it portrayed as an unobjectionable proposal to make Medicaid more efficient while preserving the programs core function namely, a per capita funding formula.

The presidents per capita cap proposal, the liberal lion Henry Waxman enthused at the time, responds to the pleas of those who want more cost discipline in Medicaid without terminating the guarantee of basic health and long-term care to 36 million Americans.

But that was before Obamacare lurched the program in the other direction. The Brezhnev Doctrine dictates that what once was common sense must now be unimaginable cruelty.

READ MORE: The GOP Is Right: Medicaid Needs Fundamental Reform The Good, the Bad, and the Senate Health-Care Bill The Senates Flawed Health-Care Bill

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: [emailprotected]. 2017 King Features Syndicate

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Government ‘reneging on promise to fund 10,000 extra nursing … – The Guardian

Posted: at 7:07 am

Emily Heron: I would be good at nursing but I feel the government is saying to people like me Im not worthy of the training. Photograph: Luke MacGregor for the Guardian

Universities are warning that the government is quietly reneging on its promise to provide 10,000 new nursing degree places, intended to relieve pressure on the NHS.

Student nurses must spend 50% of their degree working under supervision, usually in a hospital. But universities have told Education Guardian that not a single extra nursing training place has been funded or allocated for the future. It would cost 15m over five years to fund training placements for 10,000 new nurses, according to the Council ofDeans of Health, the body that represents university faculties of nursing.

Applications to study nursing in the new 2017-18 academic year have slumped by 23% compared with last year, after the abolition of bursaries. The government said last year it would free up 800m and pay for an extra 10,000 places by ending bursaries and shifting student nurses to the standard system of 9,000-a-year tuition fees supported by loans. Angry academics now say this was a hollow promise.

Emily Heron, a 22-year-old healthcare assistant who works in a trauma unit in a hospital in Newcastle, says she will have to abandon her dream of becoming a nurse because she cannot afford a degree now. I first realised I was good at caring for people when my dad became terminally ill and I had to leave college to look after him, she says.

I still care for him, and I live on my own with no family to support me. Without a bursary Id have to take out a big loan on top of paying for my house and car. As a student nurse you basically work a full-time job in a hospital and fit your degree work around that, so there is no chance of doing paid work to help support yourself. She adds: I am really committed to nursing and I know Id be good at it. But I feel like the government is saying to people like me that Im not worthy of the training.

Academics are warning that the government must train more nurses as there is no longer a reliable recruitment pipeline from the EU after the Brexit vote. The number of EU nurses registering to practise in the UK has fallen by 96% in less than a year. Only 46 EU nurses came to work in the UK in April compared with 1,304 last July, according to new statistics from the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

David Green, vice-chancellor of Worcester University, one of the leading institutions for nursing, says: I dont believe the policy intention with scrapping bursaries was to expand places; I think it was just to save money. The fact the training placements havent increased shows there was no plan to increase numbers.

He explains: We can give student nurses all the theory, but they need to actually work on a ward. Theres no money for training and we cant take people on with a false prospectus. Thats the story across the country.

Prof Steve West, vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England, which also has high-ranking nursing courses, agrees: At the moment it is not clear how the 10,000 new places for nurses could happen. No new money has been announced so it isnt clear how you fund an increase in what we currently have. Universities are already struggling to protect hospital placements for existing students, he says. Asproviders are squeezed their number one priority has to be giving care, and education slips down the agenda, he says.

Nursing degrees have traditionally attracted relatively high numbers of mature female students, often with their own families to support and often from disadvantaged backgrounds. But universities are reporting that these are the candidates who are being frightened off by high fees and loans.

At Worcester, for the first time, nearly half the people selected for interview to study nursing or midwifery this autumn have either not turned up or explained they do not want to proceed because of the new financial arrangements.

They all say: Im really sorry but I dont know how I can manage with this level of debt, Green says. Because we are right at the top of the hierarchy for nursing, we will be able to fill our places: we have about 10 applicants per place, generally. But there will be no expansion. And watch what happens elsewhere. Other places will definitely have a drop. There are nowhere near enough students to meet the shortfall. And the NHS urgently needs this workforce to expand significantly.

Green is angry that the government now treats nurses and midwives as standard students who should fund their own degrees, when they work 2,100 hours for the NHS free as part of their course, with no promise of a high salary at the end. They work night shifts, weekends and a 45-week year. They are not ordinary students and everyone knows that, he says.

Midwives have to deliver 40 babies as part of their qualification. My wife became a midwife nine years ago. She had one week during her course when she delivered 10 babies in four shifts, all night shifts with no doctor on duty. There is nothing standard about this. Its really unfair to pretend there is.

Kevin Crimmons, head of the department of adult nursing at Birmingham City University, agrees: The environment we are asking our students to go into is unprecedented in terms of the challenges they will face and the pressure the NHS is under. They will be expected to present in a hospital at 7am and face some very physical and emotional challenges. Nurses arent likemost other students. We hold them to a much higher account.

He adds: Our applications from mature students and we take a lot of mature students are markedly down when compared to last year. We are now doing outreach work, going out to FE colleges and talking to students about studying nursing to ensure they are making a decision based on the full facts.

West argues that many student nurseswill have access to more funding under the new system, butadds: They dont tend to see that: what they see is the 9,000 fees. Either they worry that they have to pay it upfront or they worry about taking on the debt. The government has been lax in engaging with the sector on how to communicate a positive single message.

The switch to fees and loans has alsogot caught up in the negative coverage about morale in the NHS, hesays. We are haemorrhaging staff quite significantly. Put the two things together and Im not surprised applications to study nursing from certain groups are lower.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said the planned changes would create up to 10,000 more training places for nurses and allied health professionals by the end of this parliament, adding that there was likely to be a bounceback on applications next year. She said that even with a 23% drop in applications the NHS would still be able to fill the required 20,000 student nursing places this year.

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Republican health plan in peril as 22 million set to lose coverage – Economic Times

Posted: at 7:07 am

WASHINGTON: Senate Republicans watched support for their Obamacare repeal bill slide into perilous territory after release of a non-partisan report forecasting that the plan would leave 22 million more Americans uninsured by 2026.

The legislation introduced last week by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was already in jeopardy, despite expressed optimism by President Donald Trump.

With Democrats uniting in opposition to the draft, Republican leaders have struggled to rally enough support from within their ranks to get the bill over the line.

McConnell has said he wants a final vote on the bill Friday, before a brief recess for lawmakers for the July 4 Independence Day holiday, but some in the party have balked at the short timeline.

The report by the Congressional Budget Office will no doubt sow deeper concerns about the viability of the legislation, which is aimed at fulfilling Trump's pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, the landmark reform of his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama.

"The Senate bill would increase the number of people who are uninsured by 22 million in 2026 relative to the number under current law," the CBO said in its much-anticipated report.

The estimated increase in the number of uninsured under the bill that passed the House of Representatives last month was 23 million.

According to the CBO, the Senate legislation would also slash federal spending by some $321 billion over the 2017-2026 period, a net savings of $202 billion over the House measure.

The CBO said that the bill's abolition of the provision requiring individuals to have insurance would lead to 15 million more uninsured people next year alone.

It also warned that some insurance premiums for individuals would be 20 percent higher next year than under current law, mainly because eliminating mandated coverage would prompt comparatively fewer healthy people to sign up.

The White House quickly dismissed the CBO report, citing what it called its "history of inaccuracy."

Five Senate Republicans publicly opposed the bill as drafted, even before the new CBO score.

After the score's release, the prospect for advancing the bill was in doubt, as two Republican senators, Rand Paul and Susan Collins, said they would not vote for a motion to proceed to the legislation.

Should three Republicans join all Democrats in opposition, the bill would stall in the Senate unless McConnell returns with enough changes to draw some back on board.

"I want to work w/ my GOP & Dem colleagues to fix the flaws in ACA," Collins, a moderate from Maine, said on Twitter, in a noteworthy expression of support for fixing, and not replacing, Obamacare.

"CBO analysis shows Senate bill won't do it. I will vote no on mtp (motion to proceed)."

With Republicans in a 52-48 majority, McConnell can afford only two defectors. In the event of a tie, Vice President Mike Pence would still give Republicans a win.

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The Supreme Court’s Religious-Freedom Message: There Are No Second-Class Citizens – National Review

Posted: at 7:05 am

While there are many threats to religious liberty, few are more consequential over the long term than the states ever-expanding role in private life. If the government is able to vacuum up tax dollars, create programs large and small for public benefit, and then exclude religious individuals or institutions from those programs, it has functionally created two tiers of citizenship. Secular individuals and institutions enjoy full access to the government they fund, while religious individuals and institutions find themselves funding a government that overtly discriminates against them.

Thats the issue the Supreme Court addressed today in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer. By a 72 margin, the Court held that when a state creates a neutral program for public benefit in this case, a program that uses scrap tires to provide rubberized safety flooring for playgrounds it cant exclude a church from that program, even if that means state benefits flow directly to a house of worship. Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, was emphatic:

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has not subjected anyone to chains or torture on account of religion. And the result of the States policy is nothing so dramatic as the denial of political office. The consequence is, in all likelihood, a few extra scraped knees. But the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.

The Courts holding, secured by my friends and former colleagues at the Alliance Defending Freedom, is significant for two reasons. First, it places another brick in a wall of precedent that stands for the proposition that once the state creates a neutral program one designed neither to advance nor to inhibit religious practice it cant exclude citizens or institutions from that program merely because theyre religious. Under these precedents, churches are able to worship in government buildings, religious student groups may access student activity fees to fund their campus outreach, parents may send their children to religious schools with publicly funded vouchers, and hosts of religious organizations may participate in publicprivate partnerships to serve our nations poorest and most vulnerable citizens. So entrenched is this precedent that it would have been a legal earthquake had the Court ruled against the church.

Second, seven of the nine justices concurred in the result of the case. This means that the principle of religious nondiscrimination in public programs has broad judicial support. Indeed, in recent years the Court has decided a number of significant religious-freedom cases unanimously or with overwhelming majorities. Yes, the Hobby Lobby case was a classically contentious 54 ruling, but other significant cases (such as Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, which kept the government out of significant church-hiring decisions, and Little Sisters of the Poor) achieved consensus.

Constitutional doctrine is usually created not by a judicial grand slam but rather through a long series of singles, stolen bases, and walks. Even the biggest cases rarely come out of nowhere but are rather forecast through other, smaller decisions. This case represents judicial progress a sharp single into center field and is well worth celebrating.

There are, however, storm clouds on the horizon. Justice Sotomayor wrote a sharply worded dissent (Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined) claiming that the Courts decision profoundly changes the relationship between church and state by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church. But this is overwrought. Again, given existing precedent, the profound change would have been a ruling against the church. The Court would have sanctioned outright anti-religious discrimination in areas as benign as tire recycling and playground resurfacing. That would have pushed Establishment Clause jurisprudence back from its trending neutrality to the outright anti-religious hostility of the most far-left judicial activists.

Moreover, the case created consensus in part because it didnt touch on the hot-button cultural conflict between religious freedom and the sexual revolution. Just before the Supreme Court announced its ruling in Trinity Lutheran, it also announced that it would hear a Christian bakers appeal in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a case that could determine whether the state can compel citizens to lend their artistic talents to celebrate events they consider to be immoral. In this case, the question is whether a Christian baker can be required to help celebrate a gay wedding. It would be surprising indeed to see anything other than a 54 decision in that case, with Justice Kennedy likely providing the swing vote.

But thats tomorrows concern. Today was a good day for religious liberty. Seven of nine justices took a hard look at a government program that explicitly discriminated on the basis of religion and rejected it out of hand. Todays message was clear. People of faith arent second-class citizens, and their churches are entitled to equal treatment under the law.

READ MORE: In Trinity Lutheran, One Question Exposed Missouris Historical Hostility to Religion Do Safer Playgrounds Advance Religion? Editorial: Trumps Half Measure on Religious Liberty

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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The Supreme Court's Religious-Freedom Message: There Are No Second-Class Citizens - National Review

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