America - Now with even more hope and change...

...and a destroyed healthcare insurance system.

//Other failures took longer to become manifest. The architects of Obamacare are deeply distrustful of the role of for-profit companies in the health-care business because, in their nearly pristine ignorance, they falsely believe profits to be net deductions from the sum of the public good rather than measures of the creation of real social value. So they created incentives to set up co-ops, nonprofit enterprises that would administer Obamacare plans in particular states and jurisdictions. It was obvious from the beginning that if Obamacare’s perverse incentives created insurance pools that were older and sicker rather than younger and healthier, these co-ops wouldn’t be economically viable: You need lots of young, healthy insurance subscribers to offset the costs associated with your older, sicker subscribers. Many of us — myself included — assumed that the federal government under President Obama would simply write these co-ops huge checks to keep them afloat. We were half right: The government is writing them huge checks, but they are failing anyway, so fundamental is their economic unsustainability. Half of the co-ops have gone belly-up already, including large, prominent, splendidly subsidized ones in Kentucky, New York, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Hundreds of thousands of customers have lost their coverage as a result. Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money has been poured into these enterprises, to no avail.//

Racist Obama policies discriminate against Blacks.

Blacks falling behind under ObamaCare

Maybe government programs aren't the answer?

Sweet, sweet schadenfreude...

...could anything be better than Peru arresting Eco-activists for degrading the ecology of a pristine archeological site?

Yes!!!

This!!!

"I am an Obama supporter but Obamacare has hurt my family."

Hah!  Racist!

If I am to be miserable, then it is vitally important that the rubes who did this to me are also miserable!!!!

Bwahahahahahahaha!!!

Unexpected!

Best Political Class ever!

Healthcare.gov average premiums increasing in 2015

And:

//Todd said his biggest critique of the healthcare law is the Democrats essentially allowed the health insurance companies to write the legislation.

“I understand the political decision to do that but you’re never going to – and maybe the insurance companies will keep it from ever being repealed, right, because at the end of the day they’ve changed their entire business model but what have you got? What is it? At the end of the day, it’s the Keep the Insurance Companies’ Industry Intact Act. They own it and obviously they want all these customers so I wonder if that’s something somebody you’ll start hearing more and more Democrats second-guessing themselves on,” Todd said.

Todd was asked if writing such a critical book of Obama could hurt his objectivity as a journalist.//

Derp.

America with even more hope and change  - Obamacare edition. 

Middle-class Americans putting off getting medical treatment because of Obamacare costs:

One in three Americans has put off seeking medical treatment in 2014 due to high costs, according to Gallup — the highest percentage since Gallup began asking the question in 2001. 

Thirty-three percent of Americans have delayed medical treatment for themselves or their families because of the costs they’d have to pay, according to the survey. Obamacare, of course, had promised that it would help make health care more affordable for everyone, but the number of people who can’t afford a trip to the doctor has actually risen three points since 2013, before most Obamacare provisions took effect.

The hardest-hit: the middle-class. Americans with an annual household income of between $30,000 and $75,000 began delaying medical care over costs more in 2014, up to 38 percent in 2014 from 33 percent last year; among households that earn above $75,000, 28 percent delayed care this year, compared to just 17 percent last year.

The lowest-income section, some of whom can take part in Medicaid and who are more likely to qualify for significant premium and cost-sharing subsidies on an Obamacare exchange, are less likely to delay care this year. Now, 35 percent of those who earn under $30,000 a year are putting off seeking medical care, down from 43 percent last year.

And:

Gallup’s results corroborate what many Obamacare supporters have confirmed about the health-care law: while it’s named the Affordable Care Act, its purpose was to increase the number of Americans with health insurance, not to make it more affordable for everyone.

“I predict … by November those who voted for healthcare will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in March 2010.

Schumer now observes that passing Obamacare instead of focusing on the Middle Class was a mistake.

Join the crowd, Senator.

If you thought Obama was cooking the books on his claim that he'd made the goal on his Obamacare numbers earlier this year...

...you would have been absolutely right.

White House says it made a "mistake" counting dental plans

The Obama administration included dental plan sign-ups in a recent report of Obamacare enrollment numbers, Bloomberg News reported Thursday afternoon.

The White House had previously said in September 7.3 million people  were enrolled in insurance coverage through the marketplaces. An analysis of those enrollments, provided to Bloomberg by the House Oversight and Government Committee, shows that as many as 400,000 of those plans were just for dental coverage and not medical plans.

Health and Human Services has issued a statement saying the numbers were included by "mistake" and that, without including dental plans, Obamacare enrollment is currently at 6.7 million:

A mistake was made in calculating the number of individuals with effectuated Marketplace enrollments. We have determined that individuals who had both Marketplace medical and dental coverage were erroneously counted in our recent announcements. The correct number of individuals with effectuated Marketplace medical coverage as of October 15 is approximately 6.7 million. Our target for 2015 open enrollment remains 9.1 million individuals. Moving forward only individuals with medical coverage will be included in our effectuated enrollment numbers.

Vox is a leftwing source, by the way.

The Prophet Alvin Plantinga predicts the Democrat Talking-points Robots' defense of Jonathan Gruber on the evening news.

They may think that they are winning, but they are really creating a monster.

Jerry Walls springboards from a quote from Alvin Plantinga to a current issue:

//Unfortunately, however, some environments can be so toxic that our notion of truth can be smothered and squelched to such an extent that we end up with no concept of truth at all. Plantinga went on to give a concrete example of this phenomenon, and this is the passage that left me pondering for days.

“It is said that one of the most serious results of the long Communist tyranny in eastern Europe was just such a suppression of the idea of truth. The truth was officially perverted so often and so cynically (for example, the official organ of the Communist party devoted to the dissemination of propaganda was ironically named Pravda, i.e., truth) that people came to lose the very idea of truth. They were lied to at every level in utterly shameless and blatant ways; they knew they were being lied to, knew that those who lied to them knew they were lying and that those to whom they lied knew they were being lied to, and so on; the result was that the whole idea of truth tended to evaporate. One said whatever would be of advantage; the question of whether it was true no longer arose” (Oxford University Press, 2000, p 216).

Anyone who has even remotely been paying attention for the past few years can hardly fail to note the similarity between Plantinga’s description of Communist tyranny in eastern Europe and a similar pattern of indifference to truth contemporary America.//

The Media - Democrat Operatives with Press Privileges.

Two CNBC journalists reveal that CNBC told them not to report adverse information about Obamacare.

During her Friday program on the "Fox Business Network," Melissa Francis made a truly scandalous revelation. "when I was at CNBC, I pointed out to my viewers that the math of Obamacare simply didn't work. Not the politics by the way; just the basic math. And when I did that, I was silenced." Francis eventually brought on Charlie Gasparino another FBN employee who used to work at CNBC who told of the time the network's anchors where called into Jeff Immelt the head of GE's office (GE owned CNBC at the time) for a discussion whether or not the network was being fair to President Obama and his economic policies. 

Francis began her program with two of the recent Jonathan Gruber videos where he talks about in crafting Obamacare, he picked verbiage that would fool the stupid Americans. Francis who has a degree in economics from Harvard, followed the clip with her account of being taken out to the woodshed at CNBC explaining that the basic math of Obamacare didn't make sense"

Straight from the horse's mouth, Jonathan Gruber telling you that the architects of Obamacare think you're stupid and most importantly, they are absolutely counting on your lack of economic understanding. They aren't the only villains in this story though. They are also depending on the liberal media to help them cover up the truth. So far NBC, ABC, The L.A. Times" and Associated Press and others, have been only too happy to comply. Those outlets have not even mentioned the video evidence, from Jonathan Gruber. It is shocking.

But it actually doesn't surprise me. Because when I was at CNBC, I pointed out to my viewers that the math of Obamacare simply didn't work. Not the politics by the way; just the basic math. And when I did that, I was silenced.

I said on the air, that you couldn't add millions of people to the system and force insurance companies to cover their preexisting conditions without raising the price on everyone else. I pointed out that it couldn't possibly be true that if you like your plan you can keep it. That was a lie. And in fact millions of people had their insurance canceled.

Ms Francis brought in Howard Kurtz who said he wasn't surprised by bias just that it was so blatant.

Finally the host brought in another FBN reporter Charlie Gasparino, who was also a CNBC alumnus, Gasparino told two media bias horror stories:

I quite frankly am surprised. I---listen I’m not surprised by liberal bias. I worked in the mainstream media throughout my career. I'm right of center. I never held back my feelings about, I’m a devote’ of the free markets, never held back on that. I seen the way it works, usually as Howard says, a lot more subtle. I will say this though; I know Mark Hoffman runs CNBC. I actually think he is a decent guy. I know Nick Yogan who runs the news, runs news operations, decent guy.

But I will say this, and here is one of chilling aspects working in the mainstream media. Two points. When I was at "Newsweek" when it looked like the exit polls were in and George W. Bush was going to lose to John Kerry, people were doing high fives in the newsroom. I’ll tell you that, that’s one.

The second thing is, there was a thing, at CNBC, right after the elections when President Obama first took office, the markets were getting crushed. The markets were scared about Obamanomics and his ability to lead. Tim Geithner didn't lend a lot of courage and confidence in the markets. And we as a network started talking about that. No sooner did we talk about that, than Jeff Immelt the head of GE, which owned CNBC at time called a meeting of senior people, including mostly anchors. Didn't call me, thank God. And they basically had a talk, a discussion about whether CNBC was being fair to the president. We should point out that GE got a lot of largess, received a lot of largess from the Obama administration over the years. Now did they tell you during this, did they tell the people during this meeting, go easy on Obama? No. But you know there is a chilling effect when your boss calls you in, says, not just your boss, the head of GE, everybody is sitting around and you're saying, oh, are we being fair to the president by pointing out that his economic theories make no sense or whatever we were doing? And you know that is the mainstream media. You know people attack Fox all the time and we give the other side all the time?

Totalitarian Liberalism.

Who would have ever imagined that the Left would use a huge power grab to prescribe their morality for everyone?

//At the insistence of the American Civil Liberties Union, the DMHC concluded that a 40-year-old state law requiring health plans to cover “basic health services” had been misinterpreted all these decades. Every plan in the state was immediately ordered, effective August 22, to cover elective abortion. California had not even applied this test to its own state employee health plans (which covered only “medically necessary” abortions). But this novel reading was nevertheless quietly imposed on every plan in the state by fiat.

The news has slowly leaked out as insurers grappling with this change have begun quietly informing employers of this sudden change in the terms of their policy. This is how Kaiser Permanente broke the news to one California church that its insurance policy for its pastors and staff would now include elective abortion coverage:

I want to formally share with you that on August 22, 2014, the Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) notified Kaiser Permanente and other affected health plans in writing regarding group contracts that exclude ‘voluntary termination of pregnancy.’

This letter made clear that the DMHC considered health care services related to the termination of pregnancies – whether or not a voluntary termination – a medically necessary basic health care service for which all health care services plans must provide coverage under the Knox-Keene Health Care Service Plan Act.  You may recall that at the request of some employer groups with religious affiliations, Kaiser Permanente submitted a regulatory filing in May 2012 properly notifying the DMHC of a benefit plan option that excluded coverage of voluntary terminations of pregnancies. The DMHC did not object to this filing, permitting Kaiser Permanente to offer such a coverage contract to large group purchasers that requested it. The DMHC acknowledged that it previously permitted these contract exclusions, but now is requiring health care service plans to provide coverage of all terminations of pregnancies, effective immediately.  To that end, the DMHC requires Kaiser Permanente and similar health care service plans to initiate steps to modify their plan contracts accordingly.

Churches Can Exclude Chemical Baby Killing, But Not Surgical
Several other California churches have received similar notices from their insurers, and others will follow. While California (like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS) exempts churches from its contraceptive mandate, there is no exception to this bureaucratic abortion mandate. This leaves California churches in the illogical and impossible position of being free to exclude contraceptives from their health plan for reasons of religious conscience but required to provide their employees with abortion coverage.

This California mandate is in blatant violation of federal law that specifically prohibits California from discriminating against health care plans on the basis that they do not cover abortion. Alliance Defending Freedom and Life Legal Defense Foundation have filed administrative complaints with the HHS Office of Civil Rights (which oversees this federal law) on behalf of individual employees and seven California churches forced into abortion coverage in violation of their conscience.//

Don't you hate it when you fail to communicate what you really mean...

....6 different times...

...on national television or at public conferences.

Obamacare - So bad that not even Democrats would vote for it...

...if they knew the facts.

//As now the third video emerges of “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber ”insulting voters,” it’s important that we remember the context for Obamacare’s lies, spins, evasions, and deliberate obfuscation. Obamacare was so expansive, so unpopular, and so outside the perceived will of the voters, that Gruber and his administration allies felt that they had to intentionally confuse and deceive the American people to pass health care reform through a Democrat-dominated Congress.//

Republicans weren't going to vote for it; Gruber and Obama were defrauding Democrats.

Worst political class in American history.

Pelosi says that she doesn't know who Gruber is, but she touted his work in 2009.

Pelosi also said "we will have to pass the Bill to find out what's in it."

It is hard to tell who has the worst case of senile dementia: Nancy Pelosi or the voters of San Francisco.

The Democrat talking-head response on the news seems to be "Yeah, it was a lie, and so what? It worked, didn't it?"

It's nice that some liberals care.

//He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women.

Liberals should be the angriest. Not only were they personally deceived, but the administration's dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public's faith in an activist government. A double blow to progressives.//

We have the worst professional media/political class in history...

...and we're just going to have to do it for ourselves.

Financial planner discovers third devastating Obamacare video.

//A third video has surfaced of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber bragging about pulling the wool over the eyes of the American public in order to help implement Obamacare.

“It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said during a speech at the University of Rhode Island in November 2012.

He was discussing what is known as the Cadillac tax and how it came into being.

In an effort to add a cost-control measure to Obamacare, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who Gruber called a “hero,” successfully pushed through a 40 percent excise tax on insurance companies for plans that cost more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,000 for families.

This was an alternative to putting a cap on tax breaks employers provide employees for health insurance plans, which, according to Gruber, the public mistook for a tax increase rather than the removal of a tax break.

“You just can’t get through, it’s just politically impossible,” Gruber said during his talk.

The purpose of the Cadillac tax is to force the “overinsured” — people with expensive health insurance plans — to cut back on “excess benefits.” Many economists believe that such plans cause inefficiencies in the health-care system. The Cadillac tax, which will be implemented in 2018, is projected to save $250 billion.

Gruber has made remarks before in which he espouses a dim view of the American public while discussing the deception behind passing both the Cadillac tax and Obamacare in general.

The first instance came to light on Sunday when a video was published showing Gruber telling a University of Pennsylvania health-care panel that Obamacare was “written in a tortured way” and that it passed, in part, because it was difficult to understand.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass,” Gruber said at the November 2013 event.

The discoverer of the video was not a journalist or a political operative, but, rather, a financial planner who was one of the millions of Americans who lost his insurance plan last year despite President Obama’s pledge that “if you like your plan, you can keep it, period.”//

The most transparent administration ever...

...wrote Obamacare to hornswoggle the voters.



Because the voters are too stupid to know whats good for them, so their liberal betters have to commit fraud.

Your government has a plan for you and wants you to be happy!

It knows better than you about whether you have a bad insurance, such as one that provides NO abortion coverage to a 55 year old man, than you do and whether you should pay more for that better coverage.

And policy cancellations are now "invitations to get the 'better' insurance."

We love Big Brother!

Obama's War on Women.

Obamacare will push more women into part-time work.

That's bad because if it was just men, it would be perfectly acceptable.

//Much of the ACA’s tax effect resembles unemployment insurance: both encourage layoffs and discourage people from returning to work. The ACA’s overall impact on employment, however, will arguably be larger than that of any single piece of legislation since World War II.

The ACA’s employment taxes create strong incentives to work less. The health subsidies’ structure will put millions in a position in which working part time (29 hours or fewer, as defined by the ACA) will yield more disposable income than working their normal full-time schedule.

The reduction in weekly employment due to these ACA disincentives is estimated to be about 3 percent, or about 4 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers. This is the aggregate result of the law’s employment disincentives, and is nearly double the impact most recently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.

Nearly half of American workers will be affected by at least one of the ACA’s employment taxes—and this does not account for the indirect effect on others as the labor market adjusts.

The ACA will push more women than men into part-time work. Because a greater percentage of women work just above 30 hours per week, it is women who will be more likely to drop to part-time work as defined by the ACA.//

America - Now with even more Hope and Change.

Minnesota's biggest Obamacare insurer leaves Obamacare exchange.

A statement from the company indicated that support costs for the exchange plan were too high. "Continuing on MNsure [the state exchange] was not sustainable," the statement said. 

The basic health plans were supposed to mitigate "churn" in the health insurance market, where income changes throughout the year often mean that low-income individuals end up switching back and forth between various forms of insurance as their incomes move up and down across eligibility borders. But they may end up turning off insurers from participating by limiting the number of people who end up looking to buy private insurance. 

America - Now with even more hope and change.

Obamacare still isn't working.