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Obamacare Tag

2014 may come down to which side makes the scarier videos. Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post says This is the ad every Democrat should be scared of in 2014. Aleister says This Is The Ad Every Republican Should Run In 2014. I say the response will be: War On Women! It worked before. Someone actually said this: "They do not want poor women to have joy" and "they want to sacrilize sperm":

Once-privileged New Yorkers who supported Obamacare are discovering that Obamacare means they'll be losing some of their privileges:
Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan...They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce... But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.
For this group, will the experience constitute the proverbial being "mugged by reality" and cause them to change their political affiliation? Perhaps for some, but probably not for most, since it takes a great deal to effect political change on a more permanent basis. Soon many doctors will be getting the same bad news, too:

Mary Landreiu is inextricably tied to the passage of Obamacare. The most recent Louisiana Purchase was not about land, it was about securing Landreiu's vote. She also voted against fixes proposed by Republicans to prevent people from losing their plans. The problem for Landrieu and all other Democrats up for reelection in 2014 is that the Obamacare rollout has been a disaster, and not just as to the website. Landrieu is getting hammered by ads throwing her own words back at her: Landreiu's apparent strategy is to try to thread a needle. Landrieu's first ad of the political season is damage control, an attempt to isolate the loss of plans and shift the blame to someone else, namely Obama (via Politico, h/t Townhall):

The Department of Health and Human Services released health insurance enrollment statistics Wednesday, and while numbers have increased, they still fall far short of original projections for the end of November. From the Associated Press, Health care signups pick up but may not close gap:
With time running short, the nation's health care rolls still aren't filling up fast enough.New signup numbers Wednesday showed progress for President Barack Obama's health care law, but not enough to guarantee that Americans who want and need coverage by Jan. 1 will be able to get it. Crunch time is now, as people face a Dec. 23 deadline to sign up if they are to have coverage by New Year's. That means more trouble for the White House, too, after months of repairing a dysfunctional enrollment website. Next year could start with a new round of political recriminations over the Affordable Care Act, "Obamacare" to its opponents. The Health and Human Services Department reported that 364,682 people had signed up for private coverage under the law as of Nov. 30. That is more than three times the October figure, but still less than one-third of the 1.2 million that officials had projected would enroll nationwide by the end of November. The administration's overall goal was to sign up 7 million people by next March 31, when open enrollment ends.
What remains an issue is how many of those who have signed up for coverage have actually made a payment. From Politico:

Obamacare was pushed through Congress at high speed, without much debate and without the usual haggling. The reason was that, like thieves in a hurry to grab what they could and get out safely before being caught, Democrats were eager to move the legislation through...

With each passing day, we learn more and more about the horrible effects of Obamacare. Here are just some of the "new" revelations. While there is ample evidence that premiums have risen for many if not most people, the NY Times finds that the supposedly lower premiums come with much higher deductibles, On Health Exchanges, Premiums May Be Low, but Other Costs Can Be High:
For months, the Obama administration has heralded the low premiums of medical insurance policies on sale in the insurance exchanges created by the new health law. But as consumers dig into the details, they are finding that the deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs are often much higher than what is typical in employer-sponsored health plans.... In El Paso, Tex., for example, for a husband and wife both age 35, one of the cheapest plans on the federal exchange, offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has a premium less than $300 a month, but the annual deductible is more than $12,000. For a 45-year-old couple seeking insurance on the federal exchange in Saginaw, Mich., a policy with a premium of $515 a month has a deductible of $10,000. In Santa Cruz, Calif., where the exchange is run by the state, Robert Aaron, a self-employed 56-year-old engineer, said he was looking for a low-cost plan. The best one he could find had a premium of $488 a month. But the annual deductible was $5,000, and that, he said, “sounds really high.” By contrast, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average deductible in employer-sponsored health plans is $1,135.
That is not exactly news, but that the NY Times is now up to speed with the rest of us is important because it helps filter the information down even to low information NY Times readers. https://twitter.com/gabrielmalor/status/410029530636894208 Jim Geraghty has more bad news, But Other Than All That, Obamacare Had a Good Weekend!:

At which Democrats should start freaking out. The polling just keeps getting worse and worse.  A couple of months ago the generic congressional election polling was having Democrats and Establishment Republicans (yes, there is such a thing) ready to wrap the death of the Republican Party around the necks of Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. Good times, good times, for Democrats. It was a false prognosis, because Cruz and Lee were trying to stop the disaster known as Obamacare. The legacy will be Democrats going to the mat to protect and preserve Obamacare. If Democrats owned Obamacare before, as a result of the efforts of Cruz, Lee and others, Democrats swallowed Obamacare whole in September. Now everything has changed because Obamacare and Democrats are one and the same. Via Hot Air, this chart which caused Charlie Cook to declare Holy Sh-t! (my paraphrase), should make Democrats want to regurgitate their Obamacare feast:
The Democratic numbers from the generic-ballot test dropped from 45 percent to 37 percent, and Republicans moved up to 40 percent. This 10-point net shift from a Democratic advantage of 7 points to a GOP edge of 3 points in just over a month is breathtaking, perhaps an unprecedented swing in such a short period. Occurring around Election Day, such a shift would probably amount to the difference between Democrats picking up at least 10 House seats, possibly even the 17 needed for a majority, and instead losing a half-dozen or so seats.
Congressional Generic Polling Data Chart 12-6-2013 While many Democrats are desperate for relief from Obamacare, those who are to tied to the law's passage, like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana Purchase fame, are choosing to double down:

Perhaps the most important Obamacare lie among many will turn out to be the one that says that the Obamacare Medicaid expansion will lead to quality health care for the people newly covered by it. Anyone who was even remotely familiar with the way Medicaid already worked was quite aware of this at the time Obamacare was passed.  Medicaid recipients were already having great difficulty getting a doctor to see them due to the low reimbursement rates. The Obamacare Medicaid expansion provides people with the trappings of care but is unlikely to be able to deliver all that much of it---unless, of course, more doctors come under the thumb of government and are forced to accept Medicaid levels of reimbursement. Oh well, doctors. They earn too much money anyway, don't they? Not in the Soviet Union they didn't. Not even in post-Soviet Russia.  Here's why [emphasis mine]:
Soviet doctors never had anything like the status and money of Western doctors. The medicine they practice was considered to be below the levels of the West, the system always suffered from shortages, and the social status of a provincial general practitioner was akin to a schoolteacher's, respectable, but modest... But under Communism, doctors at least lived no worse than anybody else -- and maybe a bit better. That has changed. Caught between an impoverished government that cannot afford universal medical care and a deep-rooted Soviet scorn for medicine-for-profit, many of Russia's doctors, especially here in the provinces, seem worn thin, out of canteen water but still marching ahead. ''When everything else took the capitalist road of development, and medicine was left on the socialist road, we got an imbalance that is killing medicine,'' said Dr. Aleksei Golland, one of a handful of private doctors in Kostroma.

Havard's Institute of Politics just released a devastating study showing a massive drop in support among Millennials for Obama and Obamacare. Bottom line is that Millennials don't like Republicans, but for the first time they don't like Obama and Democrats almost as much. Here is the key finding in the Executive Summary (at pp. 5-6):
Additionally, we found that a majority (52%) of 18- to 29- year olds would choose to recall all members of Congress if it were possible, 45 percent would recall their member of Congress (45% would not) and approximately the same number indicate that they would recall President Obama (47% recall, 46% not recall).

Harvard Survey Fall 2013 Millenial Support Recalls

The trends lines are horrible for Democrats particularly among college age students, where the gap between Republicans and Democrats has narrowed significantly:

Really, now we're going to make estimated payments to insurance companies because healthcare.gov doesn't even have a payment system? Megyn Kelly discussed this tonight. (Video added at bottom of post.) Here's the Reuters report, Short-term fix eyed for another problem with U.S. healthcare website:
Dec 3 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration has found a short-term fix to pay insurance companies for plans selected on HealthCare.gov, the not-yet-complete government website used to shop for insurance required under Obama's healthcare program. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not yet finished building the part of the website that would transfer billions of dollars in subsidies for plan premiums and cost-sharing payments to insurance companies. It is part of a long technical to-do list that has so far focused on fixing the errors and lag times in the part of the website used by consumers.... The administration is planning a "workaround" for payments, said Daniel Durham, vice president for policy and regulatory affairs at America's Health Insurance Plans. Health plans will estimate how much they are owed, and submit that estimate to the government. Once the system is built, the government and insurers can reconcile the payments made with the plan data to "true up" payments, he said.

A follow up to An increasingly dangerous presidency and More on Obama lawlessness. You can read the full testimonies at the links. The key thing is that there may be no remedy -- other than at the ballot box in 2014 -- to Obama's lawlessness. There...

Yesterday the Obama administration declared Mission Accomplished on the healthcare.gov website. But the mission that was accomplished was something of a Potemkin Village -- the "front end" has been improved to a lower level of failure. Taking the glass half-full approach, 80-90% of users will be able to use the website. But that's just the appearance side of the story. The "back end" still doesn't work right and much of the system hasn't even been built yet. Add to that the sticker shock not only from premiums, but from outsized deductibles, and the declaration of Mission Accomplished is worthy of the Tsars and Tsarninas. Here are some other historical references which may apply:

The Obama administration just announced that it has met the completely arbitrary, dumbed-down goals it set for healthcare.gov. These goals were not what was supposed to exist on October 1, but what the administration believed it could meet and therefore met in order to declare the website fixed.  Operation Fixed Website: Feds will declare healthcare.gov fixed no matter what. https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/407148182011777024 https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/407149347533361152

Operation Fixed Website is about to get under way.
Tomorrow, the Obama administration will unleash a public relations campaign declaring healthcare.gov fixed: Obama administration officials said Saturday they were "on track" to have the problematic ObamaCare website running smoothly by their self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline. "With the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users," Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News, in a statement. Administration officials have since announcing the deadline qualified expectations and outcomes by repeatedly saying the site would work for the “vast majority of people.” The Washington Post earlier Saturday reported the administration was prepared to announce Sunday that they have met deadlines for improving HealthCare.gov.
Fixed has been so far defined downward for healthcare.gov, that almost anything other than a 404 Error message is "fixed". Via NPR, How Will We Know If HealthCare.gov Is Fixed?

Compensation means how much you get paid, right? Or payment for a loss? Or any of the other common usages, right? Reader Bronwyn was not happy when she learned that in Common Core mathematics, compensation means encouraging students to guess the wrong but easier answer, then teaching them how to compensate for the wrong answer to get to the right result:
My 4th grade daughter attends a Christian school here in Orange Co., Ca. I do not like their choice in a common core math book at all, but I have been particularly amused by the use of the term "compensation." The teachers actually had to send home an email because none of the parents had any idea what the term meant. I attached a copy of the definition in the book because it just seems so fitting during this Obama Administration. "compensation: you choose numbers close to the numbers in the problem to make the computation easier and then adjust the answer for the numbers chosen." All this under the lesson- Using mental math to multiply. This must be Obama's math! Here we parents thought it was how we got paid?
Here's the question posed to the students to which the featured image was the answer: