Obamacare – Bad News All Around

Posted by Tina

Several things in the news today regarding Obamacare are worth passing along, although I considered refraining from posting them I realized I can’t let an impudent little gnat prevent me from keeping us well informed or giving everyone the opportunity to weigh in on issues of the day. Here goes:

Kaiser’s monthly poll finds that only 35% have a favorable view of Obamacare. The trend downward has been gradual and steady since last September. Realities are beginning to sink in.

As if in answer to a prayer, The Wall Street Journal published a piece by David Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Foley, “An Obamacare Board Answerable to No One”:

Signs of ObamaCare’s failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law’s most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a “death panel,” threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution’s separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.

For a vivid illustration of the extent to which life-and-death medical decisions have already been usurped by government bureaucrats, consider the recent refusal by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to waive the rules barring access by 10-year old Sarah Murnaghan to the adult lung-transplant list. A judge ultimately intervened and Sarah received a lifesaving transplant June 12. But the grip of the bureaucracy will clamp much harder once the Independent Payment Advisory Board gets going in the next two years.

The board, which will control more than a half-trillion dollars of federal spending annually, is directed to “develop detailed and specific proposals related to the Medicare program,” including proposals cutting Medicare spending below a statutorily prescribed level. In addition, the board is encouraged to make rules “related to” Medicare.

The ObamaCare law also stipulates that there “shall be no administrative or judicial review” of the board’s decisions. Its members will be nearly untouchable, too. They will be presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that they can only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Obamacare will be great as long as you don’t get gravely ill or face a chronic, debilitating illness!

Investors.com has a story that will curl your economy-in-the-dumper hair:

If you have to keep it a secret, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

But the California legislature and the new Covered California health insurance exchange are conspiring to keep secret how they will dole out more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer dollars to contractors.

The lion’s share of the money is going for what the exchange budget terms “outreach.” …

… What is known so far suggests that California politicians are exploiting health reform to enroll millions of the uninsured in the Democratic Party and fill the coffers of left-wing interest groups with taxpayer money.

Here are the facts to back up that cynical picture:

California lawmakers passed a law (Senate Bill 35) requiring that voter registration be part of the health insurance exchange.

Last month, Covered California announced $37 million in grants to 48 organizations to build public awareness about the opening of the health exchange on Oct. 1.

Of the 48 organizations that got grants, only a handful are health-care related. The California NAACP received $600,000 to do door-to-door canvassing and presentations at community organizations.

Service Employees International Union, which says its mission is “economic justice,” received two grants totaling $2 million to make phone calls, robo-calls and go door to door.

The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO got $1 million for door-to-door, one-on-one education and social networking. It describes its role as “engaging in both organizing and political campaigns, electing pro-union and pro-worker candidates.”

Community Health Councils, a California organization with a long history of political activism against fracking, for-profit hospitals, state budget cuts and oil exploration, got $1 million to conduct presentations at community and neighborhood meetings and one-to-one sessions.

These organizations, closely allied with the Democratic Party, are being funded by your tax dollars to conduct “outreach,” meaning the kind of phone banking and door-to-door canvassing that activists do to turn out the vote. They will turn out the uninsured to enroll on the exchanges and in the Democratic Party.

The $37 million awarded last month is only the first installment of California’s $190.4 million to be spent on contracts for “outreach” through December 2014.

Like I’ve written before…this isn’t an administration…this is a syndicate!

It is certainly NOT America.

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7 Responses to Obamacare – Bad News All Around

  1. Tina says:

    The Republicans can’t get rid of Obamacare all by themselves but the American people should know, as reported by Zeke J. Miller, Time Magazine:

    “Republicans continue to lay siege to the law; they have voted to repeal it 37 times in the U.S. House.”

    Who can blame them; the people are obviously down on Obamcare! With California conspiring with the Obama administration to use enrollment in Obamacare as a Democrat party voter registration opportunity using left wing “tax exempt” political activists as “navigators” funded with taxpayer money an alternative to O’bummer-care should be in the works.

    I understand the Republicans are moving forward with a plan that will cost less, cover more people, remove the complexity and tyrannical oversight, and generally serve the people and the healthcare industry better!

    See here and here.

  2. Chris says:

    Betsy McCaughey has been lying about healthcare since at least 1994, so of course you’d quote her.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/08/i-was-wrong/23254/

    And of course you’re against these outreach efforts, because you don’t want people to know actual facts about the healthcare law. You report Kaiser’s poll showing a low favorability rating for the law, but you leave out Kaiser’s other polls showing how misinformed the public is about it (due precisely to people like Betsy McCaughey, and sites like this one).

    http://kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-march-2010/

    “The public does not understand some important elements of the reform legislation, according to the poll. Only 15 percent of Americans, for instance, know that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said the legislation will decrease the federal budget deficit over the next 10 years. And 55 percent believe the CBO has said the legislation will increase the deficit over that period.”

  3. Tina says:

    Betsey McCaughey knows more about this bill than the people who wrote it or those who continue to blindly defend it.

    Lies? Hmmmm, shall we once again count the ways:

    1. You will be able to keep your insurance.

    2. You will be able to keep your doctor.

    3. Your premiums will go down…”…will cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”

    4. It will not increase the deficit/ it will lower the deficit

    5. It will create jobs

    6. The people will love it once they find out whats in it

    7. It doesn’t have death panels.

    8. Families making less than $250K will not see their taxes increase.

    9. It will improve the quality of healthcare.

    10. It’s not a government takeover of healthcare

    11. State health exchanges will open on time

    See here:

    As more of the 2009 healthcare reform law becomes reality, Americans are learning the hard way that many of the biggest Obamacare promises were Obamacare lies.

    In retailing, they call this sort of thing “bait-and-switch,” and it’s against the law.

    In Washington, it’s called “business as usual.”

    During his first campaign for the highest elected office in the land, and later as he sought to push the Affordable Care Act (ACA) through Congress, U.S. President Barack Obama made a lot of enticing promises.

    Some of these claims were true – under Obamacare, people can’t be refused coverage for pre-existing conditions, for example – but many were assurances to the average American that no matter what, healthcare reform was almost all positive with few or no negatives. (followed by a list of lies)

    See also here and here.

    And there’s more:

    At that press event, Obama told any justice thinking of overturning ObamaCare’s central tenet that “in the absence of an individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can actually get health care.”

    But this is false.

    In fact, Obama himself argued precisely the opposite during the 2008 campaign, saying a mandate wasn’t needed to achieve universal coverage. “The reason people don’t have health insurance isn’t because they don’t want it,” he said then. “It’s because they can’t afford it.”

    Plus, ObamaCare itself proves a mandate isn’t needed to cover those with pre-existing conditions. The law set up federal “high risk” pools that offer insurance to those denied it by private companies. Yet instead of making this a permanent solution, Obama kills these pools off in 2014 in favor of the mandate.

    Obama also claimed at that press conference that the law “was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

    Also false.

    The House approved it by a slim 7-vote margin, with 34 Democrats joining every Republican to oppose it. Less than a year later, the House voted to repeal ObamaCare by a significantly larger margin, 245-189.

    The ultimate truth is that people are uneducated and naive and therefore vulnerable to the smooth talking “bait and switch” president and his corrupted party of backroom dealing, power grabbing, cheats and liars.

    And here’s the skinny on (not) reducing the deficit:

    The short version: Despite repeated claims to the contrary, ObamaCare won’t reduce the deficit over the next decade.

    The longer version: The health law’s backers relied on—and are still hiding behind—government budgeting conventions in order to argue that the law will result in lower overall deficits relative to expectations about the current fiscal trajectory. No matter how you run the numbers, the law can be expected to increase both total federal health spending and deficits.

    That’s the conclusion reached by Charles Blahous, a Medicare Public Trustee, in a new paper for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

    Blahous ran the law through three possible futures. The first is an “optimistic scenario” in which all of ObamaCare’s hoped-for cost savings, including both those many suspect are “politically implausible” and even “some additional savings not scored by [the Congressional Budget Office].” The second, intermediate scenario assumes that Congress will weaken the effects of some of the law’s cost-savings. A third and final scenario does not represent the true worst case, but looks at the budgetary effects will play out should Congress decide “to overturn certain savings provisions under the ACA in a manner relatively consistent with historical precedent”—in other words, if Congress behaves exactly as it has in the past.

    In every single scenario—from the most optimistic to the most historically consistent—Blahous finds that health spending increases. So do federal deficits.

    Why are these projections so different from the favorable Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores touted by the administration? Because unlike the CBO, Blahous is not bound to a scoring convention that requires him to participate in the administration’s double counting of the law’s supposed Medicare savings.

    There are more lies to be mined but what difference does it now make?

    This law will stick and we will be stuck with it unless the people decide to wise up and demand that it be repealed!

  4. Chris says:

    Tina, the first ten of the eleven bullet points you posted are true for the vast majority of people.

    1/2: Most will be able to keep their doctors and insurance plans:

    http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/keep-your-insurance-not-everyone/

    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/11/barack-obama/barack-obama-promises-you-can-keep-your-health-ins/

    3. Premiums in California are actually going to be lower:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/23/california-obamacare-premiums-no-rate-shock-here/

    4. The CBO does project that Obamacare will lower the deficit, and that is the most objective and reliable source on the subject. Chuck Balhous’ analysis has been widely rejected, and relies on the lie that there is “double-counting” in Obamacare:

    http://whatifpost.com/non-story-of-the-week-misleading-study-claims-that-obamacare-increases-the-deficit.htm

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/04/bogus-obamacare-deficit-study.html

    http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/102617/medicare-obamacare-deficit-report-mercatus-blahous-koch

    5. It will create jobs:

    http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/01/pdf/health_care_jobs.pdf

    6. The American people do favor individual components of the law:

    http://www.policymic.com/articles/30657/obamacare-on-3-year-anniversary-public-is-still-misinformed-on-law

    7. I won’t dignify your disgusting death panels bullshit with yet another response, since it has already been conclusively proven as bullshit.

    8. Obamacare has not raised taxes for families making under 250k.

    9. Obamacare does increase quality of care:

    http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/full.html

    http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2012/07/12/11843/update-how-obamacare-is-benefiting-americans/

    10. It is not a government takeover of healthcare (the myth that it was became Politifact’s 2010 “Lie of the Year”).

    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/dec/16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care/

    11. There has been a delay in opening state health exchanges. Well, 1 out of 11 ain’t bad!

    You are stating something other than what I believe and I therefore I believe you to be wrong. Tina, and the sheer amount of your informed opinions on this complicated subject, that do not coincide with my opinions, and or my sources of contradictory information is breathtaking. And it’s why these outreach efforts are necessary. As the Kaiser polls show, people actually do like Obamacare when they find out what’s in it–away from the lies peddled by your Koch-funded sources.

  5. Tina says:

    If a person is being honest, rather than selling a load of politically motivated crap, he tells the whole truth.

    The President has not been honest and forthright with the American people. He and his cadre of super majority Democrats passed this bill in secret against the will of the people and without the people’s input through their representatives. It was passed using bribes and threats.

    The rest of Chros’s sources are socialist shills, apologist, and promoters…they are aligned with the machine Chris seems to think represents our interests.

    Unfortunately Chris, and a great many other young Americans, was raised and educated to be needy…and he thinks like a needy person rather than a blessed, free, creative, American.

    Siting the Koch brothers as evil forces is just another progressive tactic, probably to counter the truth that has been revealed about the leftist activism of billionaire George Soros.

    The Koch brothers are basically libertarian, one seems to be more involved than the other. They have worked in the private sector as businessmen and philanthropists. They helped create the CATO Institute. Their involvement in politics is a far cry from the transforming socialist political activities and ambitions of George Soros.

    The Kochs have created a webpage to counter the political accusations made about them. I invite you to visit KochFacts.com here.

    George Soros, through his Tides Foundation, has been funding Democrat “outreach” through many many left wing organizations, a number of them are radical. They are all fiercely dedicated to fundamentally transforming America. They will, if we let them, “fundamentally transform” our republic into a full blown European style socialist country….on its way to becoming another third world nation like Greece, Spain, France, et al.

    See here for a list of the many political organizations Soros funds…and don’t bother to discredit this site, Chris, we already know your opinion.

    Those new to Post Scripts should know that the above site was created by David Horowitz who was once an activist for the left and whose parents were communists. He knows whereof he speaks!

    Those interested in learning about his personal wake up call and transformation to conservatism should read Radical Son.

    You can read more about David here.

    Dependent is not free and they have just about wrapped the entire package. You are a fool.

  6. Tina says:

    Also this…

    “…the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said the legislation will decrease the federal budget deficit over the next 10 years.”

    …is old news.

    The law was written to ultimately create universal coverage by destroying the private sector healthcare industry; it hasn’t been enacted yet and its already on the path to doing just that!

    Read about Progressive intentions to create universal healthcare here, here, here, and here.

    As I wrote above: This law will stick and we will be stuck with it unless the people decide to wise up and demand that it be repealed!

  7. Earl says:

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