Obamacare’s Useful Idiots
As the HealthCare.gov catastrophe enters its third week, three obvious facts have emerged:
● First, very few users can even get past creating a privacy-invading profile which shouldn’t be a necessary condition for shopping.
● Second, the vast majority of those who are getting in to explore their alternatives do not like what they see.
● Finally, the program’s useful idiot defenders won’t allow reality to intrude on their fantasies.
Take Tim Mullaney at USA Today. For the paper’s October 4th print edition, Mullaney excused users’ problems as “technical glitches likely to be gone by Thanksgiving” (i.e., almost two months after his column’s publication), and pronounced the web site “an out-of-the-box success for consumers shopping for health insurance.” In his view, “[T]he fundamentals (of) well-priced insurance, clearly explained … are in place.”
“Well-priced?” Even hardened leftists are having a hard time handing premiums which are double or triple what they had been paying.
What kind of “well-priced” structure socks middle-aged married couples with $10,000-plus net premium increases for earning a single extra dollar of income? Answer: A structure which is so bad that it moved a San Francisco Chronicle financial advice columnist to suggest “working a bit less” to avoid losing a “huge subsidy.” Additionally, as I noted in late September, that “well-priced” structure will encourage married couples to divorce, and will deeply discourage future marriages.
As to “clearly explained,” the jury is still out, but my bet is that an awful lot of people won’t fully grasp how brutal the increases in deductibles present in so many Obamacare policies are compared to their old plans — you know, the ones about which Obama lied when he said they could keep them — until they actually have to use their new one.
Using Obamacare for medical services is on track to become extremely problematic. Insurance companies say that HealthCare.gov is not providing them with what they need to enroll the vast majority of individuals and families who believe they will have coverage in the plans they have selected. One report claims that as few as “1 in 100” enrollment applications have sufficient information. Insurance industry officials who apparently no longer fear the wrath of failed HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have revealed that “the backroom connection between the insurance companies and the federal government is a disaster.” One believes that fully sorting out the exchanges’ problems may take up to three years. If Obamacare were a private sector endeavor, the plug would have been pulled after three days.
Mullaney, who from what I can tell has made no visible attempt to amend his evaluation based on obviously damning subsequent events, is far from alone in his useful idiocy.
At the New York Times, Paul Krugman pronounced Obamacare a “success” based on one unidentified person he “talked to” in New Jersey who said she enrolled and “was very happy with the low cost.” Wow. We surrender, Paul.
Meanwhile, Times editor Bill Keller, in an item which appeared on Saturday, long after the pervasiveness of HealthCare.gov’s issues became widely known, decried “the frantic fictions of the right wing” and insisted that the web site’s failures only “confirm that there is enormous popular demand.”







There is one positive unintended consequence of the law. The ACA environment will reconnect healthcare consumers with the price mechanism. With higher deductables and more doctors demanding up fornt payment and handing you a receipt to file with your insurance company consumers will be forced to shop around for less expensive providers.
I am 15 months out from my Medicare "benefits" and fortunate enough to be able to pay cash for everyday medical services. I will be shopping around for a doctor who doesn't take Medicare so I can pay him cash and get quality healthcare at least until the government prohibits him from "exploiting" me.
-- ObamaCare has nothing to do with health care;
-- It has nearly nothing to do with medical insurance;
-- The reactions against it among medical professionals are serious;
-- Young adults will be badly harmed by the law;
-- Employers will remain extremely reluctant to hire more full-time employees;
-- Senior citizens and Medicaid clients will face drastic reductions in the care available to them.
If this is deemed a "success" in the world of left-wing public policy -- if there are more leftist commentators like Krugman who openly proclaim it so -- we need to make sure that ordinary Americans hear every last statement to that effect, even as they suffer under the new law. It is vital that the architects and promoters of this atrocity be permitted no evasion of responsibility for it.
If I Were the Devil - (BEST VERSION) by PAUL HARVEY audio restored
http://youtu.be/H3Az0okaHig
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Published on Mar 23, 2012
(WORDS on screen - AUDIO repaired) Long time radio newsman/commentator Paul Harvey created the original of this homily around 1965. This one is probably from about 1996. It was updated as the years went by and therefore versions of it vary over time. It is a warning to America about its own decay.
This audio has been corrected for proper speed and pitch and is good as I can make it at this time. Unfortunately, phasing and background noise persist.
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If the Kamikaze brigade [last time I use it, promise] stays home next year he will get his wish otherwise the Republican House will stop that one cold.
What has happened in the State exchanges are people are signing up and they are getting lower rates than before with subsidies. Remember a family can receive subsidies if they make 94K or less.
Voters will remember the party that didn't want the poor to have healthcare and just look at the states that said no to medicaid expansion. They are beacons on how to treat the less fortunate and being as they say they are so christian if find it hard to believe.
Voters will remember which Party locked seniors out of the medical system and set up a system to cap incomes.
Kathleen Failure Sebelius is her name.
So flail away friends, we might as well get this over with quickly.
Do you think destroying the medical system is going to get the poor healthcare? You cannot order a doctor to treat someone, you can't keep a doctor in practice if he/she doesn't want to and you can't force people to go into medicine. The ACA will not get the "poor" medical care because health insurance/medicaid is not equal to healthcare.
ACA sets up a three tiered healthcare system:
Tier 1: The Kleptocracy will have the same medical care that had before ACA.
Tier 2: Assembly line medicine for the working poor and lower middle class
Tier 3: Little or no healthcare for seniors and those on medicaid.
The poor will receive less healthcare than they do now and everyone except the kleptocracy will get less care for more money.
Let me guess, you think that you are part of the Kleptocracy.
Got a better idea. Get the government completely out of healthcare. My wife paid cash for an operation. It was about 1/3 - 1/5 the cost of the same operation under insurance. The government has created such perverse incentives for medical care that it costs about 3 to 5 times what it ought to.
I don't see where the government is doing much other than connecting people to private insurance companies just like companies connect with private insurance companies.
There will be a 3.? % tax on the sale of every home after Jan 1. Medical device tax. Non coverage tax; and about 800 billion dollars in new taxes over the next 10 years.
Free Medical care is not really free.
No, instead the guy who's at 401% of the federal poverty level pays for it.
This is called a SUBSIDY, or, in your lingo, Magical Unicorn Money.
O-care transfers money from the young to the old.
From the healthy to the sick.
From the maker to the taker.
Let me guess not only do you think that you are part of the Kleptocracy but you are also a Millenial.
The insurance polices are one size fits all. As a small example, my wife and I, if we bought insurances through an obama exchange, would have purchase maternity - even though neither of us can get pregnant. And that is just one example. There are plenty of others. The insurance is way more expensive than what I get through my employer.
Then there are subsidies. I have to subsidize the lame, lazy, weak, stupid and perverted's insurance. And, of course, if my insurance is TOO GOOD, I have to pay a tax on that, too.
Then there is truly perverse idea that a government can tax me for NOT buying something. Just wait and see where that goes...
Of course we also need to brace ourselves for Obamacare's rebranding as a Republican-induced disaster.