Tag Archives: political parties

More on ObamaMart

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HealthCare.gov thinks it’s made an improvement: now we can browse—sort of—some notional health “insurance” plans and their notional premiums.  The images below (because the technology is smarter than I am, so I can’t meld them into the single image that exists at HealthCare.gov/how-much-will-marketplace-insurance-cost/) show just how meaningless this “improvement” is.

And

As you can see, the ObamaMart still is withholding any sort of idea of actual costs—explicitly, you don’t get to see deductibles and copays, and you only get to see “premiums” for two age groups—which lump together too many characteristics for these made-up numbers to be taken seriously.

We still have to give our personally identifying information to the ObamaMart doorman, we still have to open an “account” before we can get into the store and poke the shelves.

The IRS knows how to do tables of options based on income.  Adding options based on health conditions—the major factors, like heart disease history, smoking, weight vs height, and so on—for the five plan categories would make a table bigger, perhaps more complex (it might even—the horror!—require more than one table), but it’s eminently doable.  And Americans aren’t as dumb as the Progressives in the White House and HHS think—we can keep up with such a table or set of tables.

This page of notions is just mendacious.

Progressives and “Disruptive”

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This is what President Barack Obama had to say (besides his sham “apology,” I mean) in his NBC News interview last week:

I think we, in good faith, have been trying to take on a health care system that has been broken for a very long time.  And what we’ve been trying to do is to change it in the least disruptive way possible.  …  There were folks on the right who said, “Let’s just get rid of– you know, employer deductions for health care.  And give people– a tax credit and they can go buy their own health care in their own market.”  That would have been more disruptive.

Because letting free Americans choose for themselves instead of accepting the diktats of Progressive Government is disruptive.  Sure.

Disruptive for whom, exactly?

More Lies

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…of my President.

If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law’s passed.  So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act you are grandfathered in on that plan.  But if the insurance company changes it, then what we’re saying is they have got to change it to a higher standard.

That’s what President Barack Obama is claiming now that his original lie has been exposed, with 2 million Americans, and counting, losing their existing insurance policies.  Now he’s lying about his lie, as with this example, made at Faneuil Hall in Boston last Monday.

No, Mr President.  You said no such thing.  What you did say was

I you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.  Period.

No caveats.  No “except if we change our minds later.”

Further, aside from your current lie denying that you said your earlier lie, your new lie also ignores the fact that your Obamacare requires the insurance company to change their existing plans so as to meet your standard—which means that plan no longer meets your grandfather criteria.  I’ve already been over your arrogance in presuming to Know Better what is adequate insurance than the person who’s buying it, whose money it is being spent on it.

There’s also this new lie about HealthCare.gov, Obama’s new ObamaMart.  Obama is claiming, through his Press Secretary, Jay Carney, that consumers who are having trouble getting through that HealthCare.gov Web site now have their problems solved: they can send in paper applications, or they can get on the phone to a “trained operator standing by” and complete an application in all of 25 minutes.

What Obama is carefully ignoring with this new one is that that paper application, and that telephone application, both have to be entered into the system—through HealthCare.gov.

Folks need to remember this over the primary season this summer and then again this fall.

Who Gets to Decide?

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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?

EMANUEL: For two reasons: first of all, if she goes in and that insurance doesn’t cover enough…

WALLACE: But she likes her plan.

EMANUEL: But we’re cost shifting.

Plainly our Know Better Progressive Government is the only one qualified to decide.  Not us, not about our insurance, not about our money.

Rule By Law

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This time using the excuse of AGW to drive the fiat governance.

President Barack Obama has issued another of his diktats Executive Orders, this time placing the Executive Branch squarely in charge of “responses” to “climate change” and wholly cutting the people’s representatives, our Congress, out of the discussion.  Never mind that human impact on climate change has yet to be demonstrated—or even hinted at very strongly.  His EO forms a task force to advise the Federal government of how to respond to climate change impacts.

Of course, it’s also an Obama-esque bipartisan group:

The task force includes governors of seven states—all Democrats—and the Republican governor of Guam, a US territory.  Fourteen mayors and two other local leaders also will serve on the task force.

All but three of those appointed are Democrats.

Obama claimed, in his accompanying White House statement,

…that even as the United States acts to curb carbon pollution, officials also need to improve how states and communities respond to extreme weather events like last year’s Superstorm Sandy.  Building codes must be updated to address climate impacts and infrastructure needs to be made more resilient.

This is just more costs inflicted by Feds on states and consumers—ostensibly to guard against climate “change,” but more to increase Federal power and intrusion into our business and private lives.

There’s more:

A possible mandate to bring sweeping new changes to land use and resource policies.

Just like the EPA’s attempts to regulate rain water runoff as a pollutant and to regulate water puddles in people’s backyards.

And

More control and refocus of climate change data….

Which will include a drive to control the release of those data and how they’re being used by the Federal government—just like this administration is doing with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS targeting, Obamacare software, etc.

So I ask: who will guard us from government’s rule by law at the expense of rule of law?  And a follow up: who will protect us from the mendacity of false climate panic-mongering?