Tag Archives: health care

Hotel ObamaMart

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You can check in, but they do everything they can to keep you from checking out.

A Missouri citizen had her preferred insurance coverage canceled out from under her by Obamacare.  She was forced by circumstance into the ObamaMart, where she got coverage for $950/mo (that’s $11,400 each and every year, for those of you following along at home).

After that, she found a better plan with coverage that better suited her needs on what’s left of the private market, and she tried to sign up.  No dice; the insurer told her she’d have to cancel her Obamacare policy first (not allowed to buy two policies from two different stores, apparently).

Cancel an Obamacare plan?  Hah.  Wolves have easier times escaping from traps.

  • the citizen tried ObamaMart’s Help line, to be kept on hold “literally…for several hours a day”
  • multiple attempts, with no luck; on to ObamaMart’s online chat facility
  • sent back to the “Help” line where, still, the pseudo-helpers on the ObamaMart end of the line only would read from a script that had no checklist items for canceling plans
  • despite her efforts, a $950 premium was withdrawn from her account
  • finally getting through ObamaMart’s “Help” facility to another bureaucratic layer, the bureaucrat inhabiting that cubicle told her cancellations are handled by a “special department”
  • asked how to contact that “special department,” the bureaucrat claimed, “I’m not allowed to tell you that”
  • drove to Kansas City, hoping her prospective private market insurer could help her get rid of this ObamaMart yoke
  • insurer succeeded in getting the ObamaMart plan canceled—after a total of six weeks from start to finish

When Fox News asked HHS what the proper procedures are for canceling an ObamaMart policy, the spokesman just said to talk to the hand:

Consumers should call the Marketplace consumer call center for assistance at 1-800-318-2596.

And the run-around takes another lap.

No word on whether she got her $950 back.  Probably not, though; that’s just part of President Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth around” mandate.

A Lawless Law

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President Barack Obama is at it again.  Now he’s unilaterally, without legal authority, delaying another aspect of Obamacare.  He’s having his IRS—his Un-American Activities Committee (at least the members of HUAC were elected by us)—not enforce through tax collections a provision that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than to other employees.  His excuse is that, four years after Obamacare was enacted, the IRS hasn’t bothered to write the rules that would effect the collections.

This isn’t the only section of Obamacare that Obama has chosen to…waive.  He has chosen to waive for an entire year the Employer Mandate.  He has chosen to waive for three months enforcement of the Individual Mandate.  He has chosen to waive, for a time, the Small Business mandate.  He has chosen to waive, for a time, provisions that forced cancelation of existing policies that individuals already had and preferred—and begun browbeating insurers into allowing those plans to be renewed if a customer wishes.  He has chosen to provide hardship exemptions, for a year, for those who find buying an Obamacare policy a hardship.  He has chosen….

The Obamacare law is quite specific on these provisions: each one must occur; there are no caveats or except-fors that say “no need to enforce if it’s inconvenient to do so, no need if it’s politically expedient to do otherwise.”  Similarly, the Constitution is quite specific: Art II, Section 3 requires the President to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.  No weasel words here, either, about picking and choosing those laws or those parts of laws that can be ignored whenever the President feels like it.  If Obama, or any President, doesn’t like a law or a part of a law, he must go to Congress and persuade them to pass appropriate legislation making the desired modification.

Whatever we might think of the “benefits” of any aspect of Obamacare or of the “fairness” of any section of it, it is, as the Democrats are wont to say, the law of the land.  It takes a lawless, arrogant President to choose, on his own recognizance, which parts of a law will not be enforced.

Obama has transformed his own signature law, his very legacy, into a monument to Executive lawlessness.

Another One of those Non-Existent Republican Health Care Alternatives

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) is implementing one.  Understanding the risks of accepting Federal money (no, he’s not reading my blog), he accepted a federal Medicaid funding cut and imposed it on the Louisiana State University’s health care system, choosing to privatize much of it.

The LSU System had operated 10 hospitals around the state and their network of outpatient clinics.  Outsourcing agreements have been worked out for nine of the hospitals and their clinics.

Jindal outsourced much of that.

[T]he first outsourcing deals, rolled out in April and June…private health providers have taken over the services previously run by LSU.

What are Louisianans getting for this?

Shortened emergency room waits and an eliminated prescription backlog in Baton Rouge.  A re-established gynecology clinic in Lake Charles.  The reopening of operating rooms in New Orleans and an orthopedic clinic in Lafayette that were previously shuttered by budget cuts.

And

[T]he numbers of graduate medical education residents have grown in Lafayette, a breast health clinic and a cardiology clinic have been added at LSU’s outpatient clinic site in Lake Charles, and a new psychiatry residency program is being added in Baton Rouge.

And

The administration estimates the state will save more than $100 million this year from the arrangements….

Hmm….