Tag Archives: health care

Knowledge of Obamacare

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Seventy percent of uninsured Americans said they do not know about Obamacare tax credits, and 45% are unaware of the enrollment deadline.  So says a poll taken by Bankrate.com.

What might this mean, really, especially in the face of a Democratic Party that’s already demonstrated an impressive skill at getting its message out to all Americans?  Some thoughts come to mind.

  • We aren’t as plugged in to the Internet as we like to think we are.  While that might be true for rural America, the number of rural Americans cannot account for these numbers.
  • Nobody reads the newspapers or watches network news on television anymore.  Declining circulation and Nielson ratings do tend to support this.
  • It might also be strongly influenced by what we actually do when we’re online or reading the papers or watching TV.  Folks no longer read the “news” or watch it on TV—they’re reading the funny pages and sports sections, and they’re watching entertainment programming on TV.  And they’re doing largely the same thing as they surf the Internet.  The “news” items, no longer being unbiased reporting of the day’s events, are being increasingly disregarded altogether.
  • And it might be a simple case of whatever the Democratic, or Republican, Party says is becoming increasingly disregarded: from the fatigue induced by the constant bombardment by both parties (but by the Democrats especially) with political pronouncement, and duns for money which add to the general fatigue, as well as an irritation aspect.  And from a growing disdain for the routine and blatant mendacity of each party.

Obamacare Dissembling

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The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it will let people keep health insurance plans that would otherwise be out of compliance with ObamaCare for another two years….

Yet, just a bit over a year ago, when President Barack Obama first “waived” the Business Mandate, he threatened to veto a House bill that would have codified that delay and that added a comparable delay of the Individual Mandate—what he’s now “waiving” for those two years.

Obama vastly prefers diktat to legitimacy.

What Personal Data? It’s Government’s Data

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And we don’t care about its security.

Security experts worried that 35 state health exchange websites were vulnerable to hackers and were rated as “high risk” for security problems before ObamaCare’s launch….

Fears that the health law’s websites could put consumers at risk have plagued the program’s rollout from the beginning, but the administration told The Associated Press that the documents offer only a partial and “outdated” snapshot of an improving situation.

Never mind that “improving” now doesn’t alter the fact that the security failures existed at the time of the rollout.  And HHS rolled out their ObamaMart, anyway.  For example:

In order to connect to Federal computers, state and other outside systems must undergo a security review and receive an “authority to connect.”

With [Obamacare], states needed approval to connect to a new Federal data hub, an electronic back room that pings Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security to verify personal details….  The hub handles sensitive information, including income, immigration status and Social Security numbers.

[In an] email from Sept 29, a Sunday two days before the launch, Teresa Fryer, chief information security officer for the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote of the state security approvals, “The front office is signing them whether or not they are a high risk.”

…CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner approved nine states to connect although the approval document noted that “CMS views the October 1 connections to the nine states as a risk due to the fact that their documentation may not be submitted completely nor reviewed…by Oct. 1.”

The Obama view of citizens’ personal security: “Hey, we got away with it; nothing bad happened.  We think.  It’s all good.”

Annals of Obamacare Lies

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is spouting more of them.  And with a straight face, too; it’s like she actually believes what she’s saying.  Which would be even worse.

There is absolutely no evidence and every economist will tell you this, that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act.

Leaving aside the well-documented instances of reduced hours, delayed (or canceled) hiring, canceled plant expansions, and so on that are occurring as a direct result of Obamacare, Sebelius is having a negative impact on jobs with her own Departmental edicts.  She’s already ordered, for instance, the Obamacare-maximum allowed cuts to funding for home health care services.

The cuts were deep enough that officials offered a damaging prediction of the impact saying, it was estimated that approximately 40% of providers would have negative margins.

In fact, those cuts put in jeopardy 498,000 jobs of home health care workers who work just for that 40% of firms that will be forced into the red—the kind of home health workers who allow Yvonne Wightman, 98, to avoid expensive hospital or nursing home stays by getting care at home.

But it’s all good: now Ms Wightman has that lowered-cost Obamacare Plan to cover those stays.  Oh, wait….

“Pass the Bill…”

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“…in order to see what’s in it….”

Here’s another of those tidbits that’s in it that Pelosi and her gang chose not to know about before passing Obamacare:

Tucked deep in the Affordable Care Act is language requiring all restaurants with at least 20 locations to list nutritional information alongside each and every item on their menu.

Sit-down restaurant chains, with their menus now required to be cluttered with “nutrition” information instead of letting their patrons see a readable menu—because Big Government knows better—are also faced, unfortunately, with a rapid-fire alteration of their menus as this “nutrition” information gets frequently “updated:” recall how rapidly the USDA’s food pyramid has been changing over the last several years.

Those places have it easy, though.  Consider the walk-/drive-in places, like hamburger joints and pizza houses, where the customer gets to mix and match from among “each and every item” to form a custom meal to buy.  As Peter Doocy put it at the above link:

Take Domino’s.  There are 34 million different pizza combinations available at the chain, when all crusts and cheeses and toppings are factored in.

Now imagine walking into a Domino’s and navigating a menu board with 34 million different options on it.

And in Domino’s case (and most pizza houses, come to that),

90% of their business comes in over the phone or online.  And none of those people ever set foot in the store, where the menu board would be.

Think about the advertising brochures Domino’s might have to send out to potential callers that included this information.  Think about how many pages on their Web site would be needed to carry this information.

Think about an utterly mendacious law that needs to be repealed, even if its replacement is the status quo ante.