Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

Obamacare Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 06, 2013 29 Comments
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:

Posted by New Neo on December 05, 2013 17 Comments
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.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 04, 2013 16 Comments
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:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 32 Comments
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.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 47 Comments

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...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2013 28 Comments
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:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2013 23 Comments
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

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 13 Comments
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?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 64 Comments
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:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2013 247 Comments

Charles Krauthamer observes the lawlessness of the Obama administration: Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter “the law of the land.” This was nonsense from the beginning. Every law is subject to...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2013 15 Comments
It may be the biggest Obamacare lie of all. Not that you can keep your health care plan if you like your plan. Not that you can keep your doctor if you like your doctor. Not all of the phony cost estimates and supposed efficiencies. The biggest lie of all is that 15-30 million additional people who will be enticed or shoved onto Medicaid will receive quality health care.  In reality, they will receive health care "insurance," but there will be few doctors willing to see them because the reimbursement rates are so low. I have mentioned before how, anecdotally, almost every doctor with whom I speak sings that same song, that Medicaid reimbursements are so low they either have to restrict or eliminate Medicaid patients. It's not just anecdotal.  Even The New York Times notes that the problem will become much worse under Obamacare, Medicaid Growth Could Aggravate Doctor Shortage (h/t @Drudge_Report):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2013 30 Comments

It will stand the test of time. Those who were willing to stand against Obamacare despite all the name calling, and who are proven to have been correct. Obama and Democrats now are scrambling to delay various portions of the Obamacare rollout, even though such delays when...

Posted by Laurel Conrad on November 28, 2013 14 Comments
Democrats have prepared a guide to confronting Republican relatives at Thanksgiving: https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats/status/405706375096827904 For those Democrats who are too dumb to remember the talking points, they even have a cheat sheet (h/t Noah Rothman): https://twitter.com/dccc/statuses/405770354314190848 And what a fantastic idea; nothing says, "this would make for interesting dinner conversation" quite like debating Obamacare.  After all, over the past month, signing up for Obamacare has really put people in the holiday spirit. Democrats are just doing what the leader of the Party wants: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/405765118492811264 To get the warm-fuzzies going, a month ago BarackObama.com introduced the idea of "it's time to have the talk" in a video on its website.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 27, 2013 7 Comments
This is a follow up to the undercover video by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas in which Chris Tarango, Texas Communications Director for Enroll America, was caught offering to help make a connection between the non-profit Obamacare enrollment group and what he thought was a Democratic Party operative. The operative was part of O'Keefe's sting operation. The video gave rise to a challenge to Enroll America's non-profit status, Fox News reported:
On Friday, a self-described nonprofit, nonpartisan government accountability group filed a complaint with the IRS that Enroll America was violating its tax-exempt status by participating in partisan politics, citing the Project Veritas video as evidence. The group, Cause for Action, has also written a letter to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot, asking him to investigate whether Enroll America and other groups have violated the state’s laws and the IRS code.
Now Tarango has resigned according to O'Keefe's website:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 22, 2013 56 Comments
It's not for nothing that Obama nuked the filibuster rule.  Yes, Obama.  Harry Reid would not have done it except with marching orders. There's plenty of commentary all around about how this is a desperate move by Obama, as he sinks in the polls and his most "historic" achievement -- Obamacare -- eats away at the Democratic Party like a flesh-eating wound. Obama can pack open judicial seats with hard core partisans, and put his desired apparatchiks in positions of administrative power. I expressed my view on the opportunity this presents, Democrats nuked the ratchet. Oddly, I find myself agreeing with some commentators who normally are not on my side of the fence.  This Dana Milbank column makes some important points, although he inaccurately also blames Republicans for allegedly abusing the filibuster, The Democrats’ naked power grab:
“Congress is broken,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday before holding a party-line vote that disposed of rules that have guided and protected the chamber since 1789.... Here’s what then-Sen. Joe Biden said in 2005 when a Republican Senate majority threatened to use a similar “nuclear option” to allow a simple majority to carry the day: “The nuclear option abandons America’s sense of fair play . . . tilting the playing field on the side of those who control and own the field. I say to my friends on the Republican side: You may own the field right now, but you won’t own it forever. I pray God when the Democrats take back control, we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.”
Accessibility by WAH