From Texan99, over at Grim’s Hall, comes this interesting little datum [emphasis hers]:
[T]he only, yes only, reason that people are losing their current policies is because President Obama’s administration (which he presumably leads) wrote regulations that overrode the grandfathering clause in all those policies.
This is important. They didn’t have to do that! It’s still reversible!
Texan99 expanded on this point:
First he lied with his bald, clearly spoken, oft-repeated “Period.”
Then he lied with his denial that he said “Period,” insisting that he really said “If.”
Now he “apologizes.”
I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.
Let’s leave aside whether we can believe him this third time around. Let’s look at what he’s masquerading as an apology.
For what is he apologizing, really? That folks find themselves in “this situation” as a result of his behavior. There’s not the least syllable of an apology for his behavior.
White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer claimed Sunday on ABC’s This Week that millions of Americans lost insurance their insurance policies because ObamaCare had deemed them inadequate.
[I]f the president were to allow people to have those plans…or insurance companies to keep selling barebones plans…he’d be violating even more important promise to the American people, that everyone would have a guarantee to access of quality…health insurance[.]
Ex-Obama advisor Dr Ezekiel Emanuel (and University of Pennsylvania Vice Provost) said much the same thing on Sunday’s Fox News Sunday.
WALLACE: Dr. Emanuel, simple question—why does Betsy Tadder need you or President Obama telling her what insurance she needs?
As Fox News puts it, “a string of embarrassing episodes for the Obama administration that the president didn’t seem to know about until the public did” is making a number of folks wonder about the quality, or the mendacity, of the staff with whom President Barack Obama has surrounded himself.
I have a different question. Call me cynical, but on what basis do we conclude that Obama actually didn’t know in advance about IRS abuses of conservative groups, NSA overreaches, the likelihood of disaster for his Obamacare rollout, the risk to and the threat against his State Department’s Benghazi consulate, his DoJ’s search-and-seizure of press phone records, …?
I asked my wife yesterday evening, “If I had lied as much as Obama has these last five years, told lies as big as he’s told these last five years, repeated them as often as he has these last five years, how long would you have stayed married to me?”
She answered, “It would depend on how much I was willing to deceive myself for the sake of status.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius—she of the previous party engagement excuse for declining to testify last week about Obamacare’s rollout failure—now is suggesting, with an absolutely straight face (say what you will about the lady; she’s a consummate actress), that Republicans, with their efforts to interfere with the infliction of Obamacare, contributed to Healthcare.gov’s failed rollout.
That’s because, you see, it was Republicans who were overseeing the writing and testing of all that bad code—both on the front end, where we can’t get in easily, and on the back end that manages data transfer to the insurers, claim processing and payment, and so on.
Kate Rogers, of Fox Business, had some thoughts.
Delaying the sign-up deadline would give the government more time to work out the kinks on healthcare.gov and allow users to become more familiar with the site and find the best plan that fits their needs, experts say.
But would it give sufficient time for the rest of the problems with implementation data reporting to insurers, payments for claims, etc to be worked out? Time to work out the “kinks” in the law itself?
On the don’t delay side, she has this:
President Barack Obama had this to say, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney, about the Obama lie that “if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. Period.”
Insurers pulled those plans away from them. The law [Obamacare] could not order insurers not to cancel that plan.
His…spokeswoman…Valerie Jarrett had much the same thing to say.
Never mind that those plans no longer were legal under Obamacare and that Obama knew it.
“I’m just hanging on to the tail. The cat’s doing the pulling.”
Sequester—that invention of President Barack Obama, with which he intended to extort Republicans and Conservatives into acceding to his taxing, spending, and borrowing economic policy—is starting to cause trouble for Obamacare, now. The sequester is blocking a set of subsidies that were supposed to help pay deductibles and co-pays under Obamacare.
Amy Payne, writing for The Foundry, quoted Chris Jacobs in The Wall Street Journal on impacts:
As the recent government shutdown demonstrated, there’s a lot of fat that can be cut in the personnel department. This is no fault of the personnel, but the fact is, we don’t need that many in Federal employ.
Here are a couple more items on that score.
The Department of Agriculture is fairly typical of most agencies in its sometimes incongruous responsibilities and huge some say too huge workforce. It employs roughly 99,000 people to service the roughly 1.4 million Americans employed in farming.
That’s 14 farmers for every DA employee.