We're All Abortionists Now!

An awesome piece, from Ellis Washington at WND, "UNDER OBAMACARE, WE'RE ALL ABORTIONISTS NOW!":

Regarding the approval of the Obamacare individual mandate by the Supreme Court June 28, in a Volokh Conspiracy blog entry by Nick Rosenkranz, “Constitutional Law after Obamacare,” there was an insightful comment by a reader named “Wolfwalker” who wrote: “[M]ost of the legal community is a bunch of fascists who have lost all respect for the Constitution much like the federal government itself. Mr. Rosenkranz, I can write your speech in two sentences: The decision upholding Obamacare is the worst decision issued by any Supreme Court since Dred Scott v. Sanford. It renders all constitutional limits on federal powers completely meaningless.”

Wolfwalker’s comment on Mr. Rosenkranz’s blog is the most astute and succinct synopsis I’ve yet read on Obamacare, both from a constitutional and historical perspective.

Indeed, Obamacare renders all constitutional limits on federal powers completely meaningless. “And there’s the rub,” as Shakespeare would say. Obamacare demonstrates to all America the tyrannical, fascist power President Obama and the Democratic Socialist Party is willing to wield like a cudgel to smash the God-given, unalienable rights of the people. By the Supreme Court unconstitutionally acquiescing to Obamacare, all Americans are shackled “under the despotism of an oligarchy,” as Jefferson wrote in an 1820 letter to William Jarvis.

For example, religious rebellion to the Obama administration’s abortion/contraception mandate have achieved new life after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals judge to review a challenge to the health-care law by Liberty, a Christian university.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals previously dismissed Liberty University’s challenge to the law’s individual and employer insurance mandates, including the tyrannous mandate by the Department of Health and Human Services that employee health insurance cover contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization drugs and abortions. This prompted Liberty University’s appeal to the Supreme Court; however, the Court dismissed the appeal when it issued its controversial decision upholding Obamacare in June.

Liberty University’s case against Obamacare was given renewed vigor by the high court Monday (Nov. 26) when it granted the school a new hearing, ordering the 4th Circuit to reassess the case Liberty University v. Geithner in reply to a new appeal. Liberty filed after the June decision. Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit legal services organization representing the Virginia university, believes that these latest legal developments renews the religious challenge to Obamacare, probably sending the question to the Supreme Court for hearing during its 2013 term.

Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel founder, chairman and dean of Liberty University’s law school, said, “Today’s ruling breathes new life into our challenge to Obamacare. Our fight against Obamacare is far from over.

“Congress exceeded its power by forcing every employer to provide federally mandated insurance,” Staver continued. “But even more shocking is the abortion mandate, which collides with religious freedom and the rights of conscience.”

At least 35 Christian universities and businesses have filed suits challenging the health-care mandates, including Louisiana College, Houston Baptist University and East Texas Baptist University. The Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission joined the legal fight in October, signing a friend-of-the-court (amicus curiae) brief in support of a joint challenge by evangelical Wheaton College in suburban Chicago and the Roman Catholic Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. The ERLC was among 11 evangelical groups signing the brief filed by the Christian Legal Society in support of the Wheaton and Belmont Abbey appeal. Others suing the federal government over Obamacare include Christian publisher Tyndale House, Priests for Life, Hobby Lobby and the EWTN Catholic television and radio network....

If Obamacare and its unconstitutional individual mandate becomes the law of the land, then President Obama and the Democratic Socialist Party would have succeeded in achieving his 100-plus-year progressive dream of perverting and deconstructing America’s republic; to in essence make all Americans slaves to a Marxist, socialist government. This atheistic, Leviathan state will then have de jure and de facto control over every birth, life and death decision for over 320 million people. However, most galling of all to me is that Obamacare has effectively made all Americans (including Jews, Christians and all religious people of faith) co-conspirators of the abortion industry’s machinery of death. Under Obamacare, we are all abortionists now!

Corrupt Bastards Club

From Sarah Palin, at Big Government, "D.C.'S 'CORRUPT BASTARDS CLUB'":

It can be argued that Obamacare isn’t full socialized medicine… yet. Right now it is a sort of corporatism, which is the collusion of big government with big business. With Obamacare, the government has taken over an industry that comprises a sixth of our economy, radically changed the way it operates, and is mandating that we purchase the services of that industry. This is unprecedented. It’s radical.

For those Obama voters who are now flummoxed by the rise in their health care premiums, let me explain why they went up. Obamacare has changed the very nature of insurance, which is a hedge against a future possibility. A 27-year-old marathon runner is much less likely to suffer a major illness than a 57-year-old obese chain smoker with a pickled liver. But Obamacare has ruled that there be no adjusted costs for pre-existing conditions, which means we threw out the actuarial data and everyone is now required to pay more to cover those who are more likely to be sick. But now average Americans – especially those healthy 20somethings who probably don’t even want to buy insurance – can’t afford to pay for Obamacare.

Obamacare in its current corporatist form isn’t meant to last. It’s meant to push us towards full socialized medicine with a single-payer system. How do I know this? Simple. Let’s compare Obamacare with the Canadian single-payer system.

With Obamacare we have crappier health care (fewer choices, fewer doctors, and an IPAB rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats, aka the ol' “death panel” that has been admitted to existing in Obamacare), but it is very expensive for the individual American. For instance, you’ll find that the so-called Bronze Plans are just as expensive as the Platinum Plans when you factor in the $5,000-$10,000 deductible in addition to the monthly payments you’ll shell out. And those Americans who aren’t being pushed onto the Obamacare exchanges are still seeing their insurance premiums skyrocket as the industry shifts onto consumers the cost of not factoring in various conditions.

Now let’s look at what Canadians have. I dare say our good neighbor to your north, and my east, has even worse health care coverage, but at least it’s “free” for the individual.

Americans, if you’re faced with a 300% increase (or even a 65% increase like my family) in your health care premiums for crappier coverage, doesn’t “free” socialized medicine all of a sudden sound appealing?

And that’s how Americans will be led down the primrose path to a single-payer system. People will be frustrated, worn out, and broke under this new government burden. Many will end up concluding they’ll settle for – then demand – full socialized medicine because they’ll see how the unworkable Obamacare will break our health care system (where, presently, no one is turned away from emergency rooms and we have many public and private safety nets for people in need), along with busting our personal bank accounts. The cry will go out, “Can’t you just put us all in a sort of Medicaid-like system? It’ll be much less confusing than these awful exchange websites and a lot less expensive!” As things stand, many who are getting slammed by Obamacare will inevitably settle for less out of necessity. And that’s the left’s declared plan: a single-payer system. They said it. I didn't.

An awesome piece.

RTWT.

ObamaCare's New Theory of Employment

At WSJ (via Google):

The Congressional Budget Office report estimating that ObamaCare will cause the economy to lose the equivalent of 2.5 million workers is remarkable on its own. But the reaction from the left—giddy celebration—is another order of magnitude.

U.S. politics used to have enough of a center that politicians could agree that fewer Americans working and others working less as a result of qualifying for a new taxpayer-funded benefit wasn't desirable. But liberals are now actively glorifying another political incentive not to contribute to U.S. economic life.

The CBO essentially says that because ObamaCare's means-tested subsidies phase out as cash income rises, some people will choose to stay poorer to keep earning benefits. Some of the giddier liberals even extol ObamaCare for "liberating" workers from the adult responsibility of earning a living.

Supposedly this shrinking labor force development is great news because "this is a choice on the part of workers," as White House chief economist Jason Furman put it. If businesses shed jobs in response to ObamaCare, he said, that would be bad because people who wanted work would have a harder time finding it.

But CBO's lost workers are splendid, Mr. Furman argued, because it means they will simply be making a rational decision to drop out or cut back, and "that, in their case, might be a better choice and a better option than what they had before." Liberals cite the 60-year-old who can retire early before qualifying for Medicare or the second-income spouse who quits to spend time with her kids.

It's worth parsing this supply-of-labor reasoning. In the post-recession economy, the unemployment rate has fallen in major part because fewer people are actively seeking work; the labor-force participation rate is the lowest since 1978.

For years liberals have lamented the jobs crisis and underemployment to castigate Republicans as mean-spirited for opposing more "stimulus" and more weeks of unemployment benefits. But if pervasive joblessness is an economic and social scourge, why celebrate a program that is creating more of it?

Apart from harm to individuals, ObamaCare is also wasting human potential because fewer workers mean a less prosperous, less dynamic economy. Contrary to liberal patronizing, many near-seniors, moms and the rest like their jobs and contribute to productivity. The 2.5 million worker ObamaCare job exodus, CBO estimates, translates into a 1.5% to 2% reduction in the total number of hours worked, which means less growth.

Liberals are also trying to spin the CBO report as an endorsement of ObamaCare's alleged health security. Mr. Furman cited the phenomenon known as "job lock," in which people don't switch employers or start their own business to preserve fringe benefits. But job lock is really about employment flexibility, rather than the government extending subsidies so people don't need or want jobs.

Whether ObamaCare is leading to fewer jobs or fewer workers—we'd argue both—most normal, nonpolitical people probably see either one as negative. We know liberals don't care about tax rates on the rich, but you'd think they'd care about marginal rates so high on the poor that it makes no sense to climb the income ladder. The liberal applause for this "liberation" shows how radical ObamaCare really is.

I've posted on this previously: "#ObamaCare Slashes U.S. Labor Force," and "CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf: People Have 'Disincentive to Work' Under #ObamaCare."

Because leftists are partisan assholes who've no clue of basic decency, much less economics.

#ObamaCare Implosion Signals Collapse of Radical Progressivism

There's lots and lots of coverage of the implosion of the president's signature legislation.

I'll be posting as much as I can throughout the day, but certainly the biggest story is now, whatever happens with the law, Obama has personally crossed a political threshold over which he'll never return. He's just not the same old ego-driven big-talker, with his chin stuck up high in the air like a pompous know-it-all. Nope. Now he's a mumbling dishonest groveler struggling to appear reasonably competent in the face of the biggest government debacle in decades. It's been an absolutely stunning political defeat. But of even bigger significance is what the president's collapse means for modern progressivism --- not "liberalism," mind you, but "progressivism," as the left adopted that term to escape the disastrous political baggage of modern liberalism and reinvent leftist ideology as big-government socialism with a wink and a nudge. With enough race-baiting and political demonization of the right, the ruse worked well enough to earn the presidential impostor a second term. But the jig is up. The bloom is off the progressive rose.

Charles Krauthammer offers a devastating autopsy, "Why liberals are panicked about Obamacare":

At stake ... is more than the fate of one presidency or of the current Democratic majority in the Senate. At stake is the new, more ambitious, social-democratic brand of American liberalism introduced by Obama, of which Obamacare is both symbol and concrete embodiment.

Precisely when the GOP was returning to a more constitutionalist conservatism committed to reforming, restructuring and reining in the welfare state (see, for example, the Paul Ryan Medicare reform passed by House Republicans with near-unanimity), Obama offered a transformational liberalism designed to expand the role of government, enlarge the welfare state and create yet more new entitlements (see, for example, his call for universal preschool in his most recent State of the Union address).

The centerpiece of this vision is, of course, Obamacare, the most sweeping social reform in the past half-century, affecting one-sixth of the economy and directly touching the most vital area of life of every citizen.

As the only socially transformational legislation in modern American history to be enacted on a straight party-line vote, Obamacare is wholly owned by the Democrats. Its unraveling would catastrophically undermine their underlying ideology of ever-expansive central government providing cradle-to-grave care for an ever-grateful citizenry.

For four years, this debate has been theoretical. Now it’s real. And for Democrats, it’s a disaster.

It begins with the bungled rollout. If Washington can’t even do the Web site — the literal portal to this brave new world — how does it propose to regulate the vast ecosystem of American medicine?

Beyond the competence issue is the arrogance. Five million freely chosen, freely purchased, freely renewed health-care plans are summarily canceled. Why? Because they don’t meet some arbitrary standard set by the experts in Washington.

For all his news conference gyrations about not deliberately deceiving people with his “if you like it” promise, the law Obama so triumphantly gave us allows you to keep your plan only if he likes it. This is life imitating comedy — that old line about a liberal being someone who doesn’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory.

Lastly, deception. The essence of the entitlement state is government giving away free stuff. Hence Obamacare would provide insurance for 30 million uninsured, while giving everybody tons of free medical services — without adding “one dime to our deficits,” promised Obama.

This being inherently impossible, there had to be a catch. Now we know it: hidden subsidies. Toss millions of the insured off their plans and onto the Obamacare “exchanges,” where they would be forced into more expensive insurance packed with coverage they don’t want and don’t need — so that the overcharge can be used to subsidize others.

The reaction to the incompetence, arrogance and deception has ranged from ridicule to anger. But more is in jeopardy than just panicked congressional Democrats. This is the signature legislative achievement of the Obama presidency, the embodiment of his new entitlement-state liberalism. If Obamacare goes down, there will be little left of its underlying ideology.

And realize that it's not just people like Krauthammer who recognize the impact of ObamaCare's implosion on the entire leftist project. Ezra Klein, perhaps the progressive left's biggest ObamaCare booster outside of the White House, grudgingly acknowledges how this disaster is crushing modern progressivism, even if he's loathe to express it in so many words. See, "Wonkbook: Obamacare’s troubles threaten Obama’s core political project":

Like many Democrats of his generation, Obama believes that the government is necessary — but that the government must be redeemed if it's to be trusted. He thinks the American people are rightly suspicious that the government doesn't do big things well. He venerates the market's capacity for innovation and efficiency even as he struggles against its ruthlessness and cruelty. And he ran for office convinced that if the American political system was going to be able to address the country's problems going forward, it would require an end to the old ideological battles and the forging of a new policy consensus.

The Affordable Care Act is the purest incarnation of these theories. It's meant to protect Americans from the predations of both the job market and the health-insurance market by making sure the poorest Americans can afford coverage, the sickest Americans can't be denied it and no one is tricked into plans that prove inadequate when health crises strike.

But it's also meant to avoid the pitfalls — both substantive and political — of big-government programs by relying on private insurers competing in tightly regulated, highly transparent, government-structured marketplaces. That's why Obama modeled the plan off of Mitt Romney's largely successful health reforms in Massachusetts. What better way to absorb Republican ideas and generate Republican buy-in then to adopt an idea from one of the GOP's leading lights?

Obamacare's success would've affirmed the theories underlying Obama's presidency — theories that could then be picked up by future presidents. Instead, Obamacare is systematically blowing apart the very premises it's based on.

Of course we'll be seeing last gasp efforts on the left to spin the ObamaCare collapse as the fault of Republicans or the insurance companies, but at this point the most common word I'm hearing on television news is "panic." It's indeed a turning point.

Now there's lots of shadenfreude on the right, and for good reason. This is a wholly owned Democrat debacle. The important thing for conservatives is to avoid acceding co-ownership of the sundry healthcare fixes now being floated on Capital Hill. Sure, constituents need relief. But short-term fixes to the law aren't smart. We need to repeal and replace ObamaCare in toto, and despite the meme that Republicans haven't offered alternatives, the fact is market-based healthcare reforms have been in wide circulation throughout the entire past five years of the Obama interregnum. What matters is for Republicans to win majority control of Congress and the presidency. Then they'll have the institutional political power to unwind the plague of progressivism that's been destroying America for these last few sorry years.

BONUS: At Hot Air, "Krauthammer: Obama’s insurance “fix” just another example of him “rewriting a law unilaterally”."

New Calls to Repeal #ObamaCare

From Bridget Johnson, at PJ Media, "ObamaCare Opponents Energized by Delay, Urge Full Repeal":

Lawmakers critical of ObamaCare were claiming victory at the announcement that the administration would postpone for one year the requirement that businesses cover their employees.

But they also used the Treasury Department’s news as a springboard to issue fresh calls for full repeal of the healthcare law.

“This is a remarkable acknowledgment by the Obama Administration that ObamaCare is a disaster in progress that will hurt job creators and those looking for work,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “The solution to ObamaCare is not to delay the day when the Internal Revenue Service comes after struggling American businesses who cannot afford to provide Washington mandated health coverage. The solution is to repeal it entirely.”

“This monstrous and unaffordable law is bad for business, bad for our economy, and bad for jobs. If the Administration is incapable of fully implementing ObamaCare after three years, then it is clearly too complex to force upon families and small businesses,” said Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise (R-La.) noted that President Obama publicly criticizes House Republicans for fighting to repeal Obamacare but “has been privately trying to waive portions of the law for select groups.”

“We have been pointing out for years that Obamacare will be a disaster for hard-working families, and today President Obama finally agreed that this law is not ready for prime time by delaying the employer mandate. The president’s decision is further proof that we need to fully repeal this failed law,” Scalise said. “We stand ready to work on a bipartisan solution to lower health care costs and fix the real problems without the unworkable mandates and taxes in the President’s health care law.”

The law requires businesses of 50 employees or more to provide a prescribed level of health insurance or pay a penalty between $2,000 and $3,000 for each employee working 30 hours or more a week. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) pointed to a Hudson Institute study that found this mandate is expected to lead to an estimated 3.2 million lost jobs

“While the Administration finally admitted that the employer mandate is unworkable in 2014, it now must recognize that the real problem continues to be the entire Affordable Care Act,” Moran said. “Implementation of the ACA has not lowered costs or increased access as promised. Individuals, families and employers still face increasing health insurance costs, new taxes overseen by what we have recently learned is a politically-biased IRS, burdensome mandates, and massive uncertainty because of this flawed law. The best course of action is to dismantle the ACA and replace it with practical reforms that are workable and will actually reduce health care costs.”

Even a few Democrats were happy with the delay...

And see the Heritage Foundation, "It’s Official: Administration Admits Obamacare Is a Job-Killer," and "Morning Bell: So Which Part of Obamacare Works, Then?"

Plus, "The Massive Costs of the Latest Obamacare Waiver."

Vicious Leftists Attack Julia Boonstra as 'Not Really Harmed by #ObamaCare'

Well, that didn't take long at all, less than twenty-four hours, to be precise.

Indeed, right on cue: "How Long Until Democrats Demonize Leukemia Patient Julie Boonstra for Excoriating #ObamaCare?"

It turns out WaPo's Glenn Kessler ran a fact-check on the Americans for Prosperity ad featuring Boonstra, who lost her health insurance under ObamaCare, was terrorized and traumatized by the initial problems with HealthCare.gov, and is now stressed out by the dangerous variability of her out-of-pocket expenses. As noted at the Detroit Free Press a couple of weeks ago:

Boonstra was diagnosed with leukemia five years ago and relies on daily oral chemotherapy. In October, Boonstra was among an estimated 225,000 Michigan residents who received notices the health insurance they purchased on the individual market would be discontinued for not meeting new standards under the law. She said she was covered under a Blue Care Network private plan with a $1,100-a-month premium but low out-of-pocket costs.

Boonstra was dogged by technical difficulties on the federal health care exchange website and panicked she would be unable to keep her University of Michigan doctors and lifesaving treatment. Ultimately, she enrolled in a new Blue Cross Blue Shield plan through an agent where her premiums were cut in half at $571, but she pays higher out of pocket costs. She’s still seeing her U-M oncologist.

“I just want my plan back, I really do,” said Boonstra, 49, a mother of two. “It was extremely expensive and there are things as far as oral chemotherapies that need to be done to reduce the cost. ... But I was covered and I made having a great health plan a priority for me and that was taken away from me.”

Ms. Boonstra liked her existing coverage. She believed the president, who (falsely and repeatedly) said she'd be able to keep her plan. She was lied to. And she was terrorized by the bureaucratic nightmare of the ObamaCare website rollout.

But none of this matters to the despicable Democrat-collectivist healthcare trolls, most prominently the brainless Mother Jones derp Kevin Drum, who uses Kessler's sleazy attack on Boonsta's nightmare experience to blanket-slur Republicans for their opposition to the president's ObamaCare clusterf-k: "Has Anyone in America Actually Been Harmed by Obamacare?" (via Memeorandum):

Boonstra herself is naturally unavailable for comment, and the best an unctuous AFP spokesperson could do to defend this ad is to point out that Boonstra's costs are a little more variable than in the past. Instead of paying a flat $1,100 per month plus low out-of-pocket costs, she sometimes pays more in a single month until she hits her annual out-of-pocket max. That's it.

This ad implies that Boonstra flatly can't afford coverage anymore. It implies that she could no longer see her old doctor. It implies that Obamacare is killing her. None of this is true. Boonstra's care is better and cheaper than it was before. The only downside is that her payments are slightly more erratic than in the past.

So here's my question: if this is the best AFP can do, does that mean that no one is truly being harmed by Obamacare? Hell, I'm a diehard defender of Obamacare, and even I concede that there ought to be at least hundreds of thousands of people who are truly worse off than they were with their old plans. But if that's the case, why is it that every single hard luck story like this falls apart under the barest scrutiny? Why can't AFP find someone whose premiums really have doubled and who really did lose her doctor and who really is having a hard time getting the care she used to get?

If this is happening to a lot of people, finding a dozen or so of them shouldn't be hard. But apparently it is. So maybe it's not actually happening to very many people at all?

This is wrong --- and vicious --- on so many levels. It's not just ridiculous. It's reprehensible.

Forget Kessler's idiotic fact-check. The reality is that Boonstra may well pay so much more in a single month as to make her medications unaffordable, just as the ad indicates; and yet the ghoulish Drum pounces on this woman with the incredulous, "That's it!??" "How dare you Boonstra refuse to sacrifice for the collective?!!"

You see, leftists simply won't tolerate citizens who resist being violently coerced into government programs they don't need, programs that impose hardships and inconvenience, and that take away individual choice and self-sufficiency. We can't have that under the Obama regime. These Democrat collectivists will say, "You will have ObamaCare and you will like it, or else!"

I mean, seriously. The RealClearPolitics polling average for the last month has public support of ObamaCare at 38.4. (Just over half --- a simple majority --- oppose this statist healthcare monstrosity.)

But for radical leftists, you must sacrifice for the social good!

See the idiot tool Ron Chusid's lame defense of this Obamanation, "If Obamacare Is So Bad, Why Can’t The Right Wingers Find Real Losers Under Obamacare?":

While a small minority of us are paying more, a tremendous number of people are now able to obtain coverage who could not obtain it in the past because it was too expensive or insurance companies would not cover them due to per-existing medical conditions. I have patients in this situation who could not obtain coverage in the past but have been covered since January. With all the bogus complaints about people losing their coverage, the significant number is that zero people can now be dropped by their insurance because they become sick, and zero people have to fear losing their insurance should they stop working.

On top of all these benefits, the Affordable Care Act will help the economy. The recent Congressional Budget Office Report, frequently distorted by Republicans, shows that the Affordable Care Act will reduce unemployment, help decrease the deficit, and allow more people to leave large corporations to start small businesses. The effects of this freedom from the “insurance trap” cannot be scored in a CBO report, but should provide a tremendous boost to the economy.

Right.

"Bogus complaints" of millions of Americans ("a small minority") whose existing coverage was ripped out from under them by this disastrous legislation. And look at the pile of lies Chusid heaps on in that second paragraph quoted above: No, the CBO report wasn't "distorted by Republicans"; no, ObamaCare will not "reduce unemployment"; no, more people will not "leave large corporations to start small businesses"; and no, there is no such thing as an "insurance trap." God, this Chusid clown's a shameless liar.

But then again, I predicted that leftists would demonize Ms. Boonstra, especially so since the "evil" Koch brothers are the financial backbone behind AFP's political advertising, and here it comes:

This lady is a liar. The numbers don't add up and her medication is covered. This is a scam This is a disgusting attempt at getting her "10 minutes" of fame all based on a GOP lie. Rep. Walberg, the Koch Brothers, and Ms. Boonstra should be ashamed for this charade. There is enough in the ACA to ridicule without making up lies and stories for sympathy. A liar is a liar. How do you look in the mirror each morning ??

I rest my case.

#ObamaCare Backers Choking on Their Promises and Running for the Hills

From Michelle Malkin, "Eat your own words, Debbie Wasserman Schultz!":

.@michellemalkin Thanks for spreading the word! You'll be eating them next year. #GetCovered

— D Wasserman Schultz (@DWStweets) December 18, 2013

At the end of 2013, Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had some nasty words for yours truly. Irked that I used my Twitter feed to criticize her Obamacare propaganda efforts, Wasserman Schultz snarked back at me:

“Thanks for spreading the word! You’ll be eating them next year. #GetCovered.”

Classy as always. And completely wrong-headed as usual. Less than three months into 2014, how’s dutiful Debbie and her Dear Leader’s pet government takeover program doing? The most recent retreat measures — call it the Obamacare Endangered 2014 Midterm Democrats’ Rescue Plan — include:

–Allowing insurers for two extra years to continue selling plans that otherwise would have been banned by Obamacare. Last fall, Americans across the country and from all parts of the political spectrum raised an uproar in the wake of millions of Obamacare-induced cancellation notices on their individual market health plans. President Obama trotted out a “keep your plan” Band-Aid effective through this year. Now, the “transitional period” will extend through October 2016 and cover policyholders until the following September, after Obama is safely out of office.

–Extending the open enrollment period for 2015 from November 2014 to February 2015, a month longer than originally scheduled. (It will no doubt be extended again as the midterm elections get closer.)

–Relaxing eligibility requirements for insurers to qualify for financial help under a three-year program intended to cushion insurers’ costs of complying with Obamacare mandates.

–Exempting labor unions, universities and other self-insured employers from paying a fee that creates the above-noted fund.

In addition, the White House last month allowed medium-sized employers an extra year to comply with the Obamacare mandate to offer insurance to all full-time workers and reduced the percentage of workers that large companies are required to cover. These latest regulatory walk-backs by administrative fiat all come on the heels of dozens of administrative delays and rollbacks.

While Democrats complain about Republican Obamacare repeal efforts, we may be nearing a special inflection point at which the White House will have reneged on more Obamacare regulations than it’s actually enforcing!

Remember: In November 2010, the White House began issuing thousands of waivers to unions, cronies, businesses and organizations that offered affordable health insurance or prescription drug coverage with limited benefits outlawed by Obamacare. The federalized health care architects had sought to eliminate those low-cost plans under the guise of controlling insurer spending on executive salaries and marketing. Despite the waivers, the mandate has led to untold disruptions in the marketplace and has prompted businesses to cancel the beneficial plans altogether and/or slash wages and work hours.

Keep reading.

It's going to be a Democrat bloodbath in November. I'm so excited. I can't wait.

Obama Rewrites #ObamaCare

At WSJ, "Another Day, Another Lawless Exemption, Once Again for Business" (at Memeorandum)":

'ObamaCare" is useful shorthand for the Affordable Care Act not least because the law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day. His latest lawless rewrite arrived on Monday as the White House decided to delay the law's employer mandate for another year and in some cases maybe forever.

ObamaCare requires businesses with 50 or more workers to offer health insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, but last summer the Treasury offered a year-long delay until 2015 despite having no statutory authorization. Like the individual mandate, the employer decree is central to ObamaCare's claim of universal coverage, but employers said the new labor costs—and the onerous reporting and tax-enforcement rules—would damage job creation and the economy.

ObamaCare requires businesses with 50 or more workers to offer health insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, but last summer the Treasury offered a year-long delay until 2015 despite having no statutory authorization. Like the individual mandate, the employer decree is central to ObamaCare's claim of universal coverage, but employers said the new labor costs—and the onerous reporting and tax-enforcement rules—would damage job creation and the economy.

Liberals insisted that such arguments were false if not beneath contempt, but then all of a sudden the White House implicitly endorsed the other side. Now the new delay arrives amid a furious debate about jobs after a damning Congressional Budget Office report last week, only this time with liberals celebrating ObamaCare's supposed benefits to the job market.

Well, which is it? Either ObamaCare is ushering in a worker's paradise, in which case by the White House's own logic exempting businesses from its ministrations is harming employees. Or else the mandate really is leading business to cut back on hiring, hours and shifting workers to part-time as the evidence in the real economy suggests.

Under the new Treasury rule, firms with 50 to 99 full-time workers are free from the mandate until 2016. And firms with 100 or more workers now also only need cover 70% of full-time workers in 2015 and 95% in 2016 and after, not the 100% specified in the law.

The new rule also relaxes the mandate for certain occupations and industries that were at particular risk for disruption, like volunteer firefighters, teachers, adjunct faculty members and seasonal employees. Oh, and the Treasury also notes that, "As these limited transition rules take effect, we will consider whether it is necessary to further extend any of them beyond 2015." So the law may be suspended indefinitely if the White House feels like it.

By now ObamaCare's proliferating delays, exemptions and administrative retrofits are too numerous to count, most of them of dubious legality. The text of the Affordable Care Act specifically says when the mandate must take effect—"after December 31, 2013"—and does not give the White House the authority to change the terms.

Changing an unambiguous statutory mandate requires the approval of Congress, but then this President has often decided the law is whatever he says it is...

More.

Meanwhile, erstwhile diehard ObamaCare defender Martin "BooMan" Longman isn't much defending the law anymore. Instead, he's taken to attacking Ron Fournier for slamming this idiot White House as indefensible. Hey, when the truth hurts, attack the messenger.

BooMan's a f-king dolt. I'm seriously jonesin' to beat November's election results over his head. Something to look forward to for sure, the damned-ass loser.

Tough Resistance to GOP's #ObamaCare Overhaul

Ann Coulter's pretty tough, and she hates it!

Heh.

But see the Los Angeles Times, "Obamacare overhaul faces resistance in Congress from right and left":

Who wrote this piece of crap Obamacare replacement bill? Please be specific.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017

I have to give full identifying info as each health ins co goes bankrupt. What are names of the brain trust that wrote this piece of crap?

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017

Also, I would like every person involved in the writing of this Obamacare replacement POS to take a ten-minute IQ test. Transparency!

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017

House GOP leadership faced mounting opposition Tuesday after introducing an Obamacare repeal and replace bill that was rejected by small government conservatives, panned by Republican moderates and given only lukewarm support from President Trump.

One day after unveiling the GOP’s long-promised effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better, the new American Health Care Act already appears to be on life support, unlikely to survive the onslaught of friendly fire unless Trump personally rallies his party.

But Trump’s intervention looks uncertain. While the president embraced “our wonderful new healthcare bill” in an early morning tweet, he also suggested it’s just a starting point “for review and negotiation” — opening the floodgates to alternative ideas and proposals that could take weeks to sort out.

Later, in a White House meeting with House Republicans, he offered a stronger endorsement, saying he was "proud to support" their plan and expected it to pass “very quickly.”

At the same time, though Trump is also accepting back-channel calls from conservative Republican opponents — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — who are warning him off legislation they view as nothing more than a revamped federal entitlement program. Conservative lawmakers are being backed by the Koch network, whose supporters rallied outside the Capitol on Tuesday, and other influential groups including Heritage Action and Club for Growth. They dismiss the GOP leadership’s bill as “Obamacare 2.0” or “Obamacare lite.”

“This is not the Obamacare repeal bill we’ve been waiting for,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is leading the GOP opposition with Paul and the House Freedom Caucus. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also raised objections.“We promised the American people we would drain the swamp and end business as usual in Washington. This bill does not do that,” Lee said. “This is exactly the type of backroom dealing and rushed process that we criticized Democrats for, and it is not what we promised the American people.”

For seven years Republicans have promised to end Obamacare, and after winning repeated congressional elections on their promise to repeal and replace the law, they were confident Democrats would have no choice but to join them.

But Democrats have shown no interest in the GOP bill, saying it would drop millions of Americans from healthcare coverage without offering them viable alternatives. Rather than being spooked by their November election losses, Democrats have been buoyed by the outpouring of support for Obamacare by constituents and protesters flocking to lawmakers’ town hall meetings across the country...

Democrat Denial About #ObamaCare's Midterm Repercussions in 2014

Yes, I can see why Democrats are starting to freak over their party leadership's ObamaCare denial.

Here's Debbie Wasserman Schultz from last week, "Wasserman Schultz: 'You're Darn Right' We'll Run on Obamacare."

And now here's this at Politco, "Democrats worry leaders in denial on Obamacare":

Democratic leaders claim the bungled launch of Obamacare is just the latest news sensation — a media-stirred tempest that looks in the heat of the moment like it could upend the midterm election, but ends up fizzling well before voters head to the polls.

Some party strategists say they’re in denial.

And that perceived gap between party spin and facts on the ground is fueling worries that the White House and Democratic higher-ups aren’t taking the possible electoral blowback seriously enough or doing enough to shield their candidates. Democratic contenders in the toughest races are distinctly less convinced that Obamacare will fade as an election-year issue — and they can’t afford to just cross their fingers that things get ironed out or that Republicans revert to political hara-kiri.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a forum hosted by BuzzFeed recently that the rollout won’t “hurt us in 2014,” adding that “we’re proud” of the law. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a recent appearance on CNN, went so far as to assert that Obamacare would be “an advantage” for Democratic candidates next year.

“Democrats will run on the Affordable Care Act and win,” she has also told reporters.

The White House, meanwhile, has come across as equally dismissive of Obamacare’s consequences for 2014.

“The fact is that [the president] is focused on delivering the access to quality and affordable health insurance to the American people that the Affordable Care Act promises. He’s not concerned about the politics of that,” White House press secretary Jay Carney recently said.

Polls, however, suggest Democrats should be worried. A CBS News poll released Wednesday showed Obama with a 37 percent approval rating, his lowest figure ever in that survey. Another all-time low in the poll: approval of Obamacare, which stood at 31 percent.

Republicans are placing their chips on Obamacare as their defining 2014 issue and putting their money where their mouths are. The Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity has launched a $4 million TV ad offensive targeting House and Senate Democrats on the health care law. As much as they might be tempted, those on the receiving end can’t easily flee from the law because many or most of them voted for it.

“We’re trying to deny what everyone knows is happening,” said one Democratic pollster who is a veteran of competitive congressional races. “Anybody who is halfway intelligent knows this is a big … problem for us. It’s impossible not to see. We can try to hide our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not a problem, but it is.”

Hundreds of Thousands of Public Sector Workers Face Cutbacks from #ObamaCare

Hey, what about no one being harmed by this Democrat-collectivist monstrosity?

At the New York Times, "Public Sector Cuts Part-Time Shifts to Bypass Insurance Law."

Commentary from Jonathan Tobin, "New ObamaCare Losers: Public Employees":

[Kathleen] Sebelius was as wrong about the question of ObamaCare’s impact on employment as she was about the rollout of the law’s website. But the problem for the administration isn’t just a credibility gap that was already as big as the Grand Canyon. It’s that the ranks of ObamaCare losers are now growing and being filled by people that are the backbone of the Democratic Party. That means the real myth about ObamaCare is the assumption that once it goes into effect it will be transformed from an unpopular law to a beloved national institution like Social Security.

The findings of the Times report validate the conclusions of the Congressional Budget Office study released earlier this month on the impact of ObamaCare on employment. Though administration figures like Sebelius have been orchestrating a campaign seeking to deny these facts, the Times story illustrates the futility of this effort. Municipalities and public institutions around the country have been cutting the hours of their workers in order to avoid paying for their health care. Thus even though the point of the Affordable Care Act was to get more people covered, the unintended consequence of its passage was to cut the pay as well as deprive a significant population of public-sector workers of their chance to get insurance from their employer.

As the article notes, public workers are being especially hard hit because municipal employers can’t pass along the increased costs of the insurance mandates to consumers the way private companies can try to do. Instead, they must cut down on the number of those they employ. But rather than reduce the ranks of those public employees getting expensive benefits and pensions that often are far more generous than those received by the taxpayers who pay their salaries, the people losing out in the ObamaCare squeeze are those at the bottom end of the wage scale.

These findings once again point out the problem with the administration’s belief that their ObamaCare troubles are merely the result of a rough rollout and will soon disappear. It is true that millions of Americans who are either poor or have pre-existing medical conditions will be net winners as a result of ObamaCare. But unlike government entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, ObamaCare has also created a vast number of net losers who are losing coverage, losing jobs, or getting their hours and possible benefits cut.

The fact that a large number of those losers are members of a demographic that is a key element of the Democratic base is a potential political disaster for the president’s party. Rather than going away as the midterms approach, if the Times is to be believed, it is getting worse. In this case, the Democratic focus on income inequality appears to be pertinent. But rather than being able to blame the plight of low-income workers on the wealthy or the Republicans, it is President Obama’s signature accomplishment that is to blame.

Yeah, Democrats are wrong alright. And they'll stop at nothing to destroy critics of this monumental failure of far left-wing ideology.

Whoa! Chicago Tribune Calls for Full-Blown #ObamaCare Repeal!

Points and Figures has it, "Hey, it looks like Senator Ted Cruz was right! Even the venerable Chicago Tribune is calling for outright repeal of Obamacare. It’s what happens when one party rams objectives down the throat of constituents."

And at the Tribune, "Stop digging. Start over":

As Friday dawns, here's what a health insurance crisis looks like to many millions of Americans: Barely six weeks shy of 2014, they do not know whether they will have medical coverage Jan. 1. Or which hospitals and doctors they might patronize. Or what they may pay to protect themselves and their families against the chance of medical and financial catastrophe. How much, that is, they may pay in order to satisfy the Democratic politicians and federal bureaucrats who are worsening a metastasizing health coverage fiasco.

For perhaps 5 million of those Americans thus far — estimates vary — the Washington-ordered cancellation of their policies is especially maddening. In the past these people took responsibility for their coverage and bought policies that balanced their needs, finances and personal choices. Congress and President Barack Obama, by enacting the Affordable Care Act, in effect ordered insurers to dismantle many of those individual plans — and cancel those policies.

The Americans manhandled by this exercise in government arrogance now find themselves divided into warring tribes: Those with chronic ailments who have found new plans on Obamacare exchanges and are pleased. Those who don't want or can't afford the replacement policies Obamacare offers them. Those whose new policies block them from using the health providers who have treated them for many years. The estimated 23 million to 41 million people whose employer-sponsored plans are the next to be imperiled. And on and on.

Most of these tribespeople only wish their big problem was a slipshod Obamacare website. On Thursday, their plight grew more frightful. With even Democratic members of Congress storming the White House over the cancellations, Obama declared — by what legal authority is unclear — that he would overrule the law he signed in 2010 and allow insurers to extend those canceled policies for a year.

If, that is, insurance regulators of the 50 states permit this potential distortion to risk pools inside and outside of Obamacare. The regulators, including those in Illinois, had better put protection ahead of politics: Within two hours of Obama's announcement, Mike Kreidler, insurance commissioner of Washington, a Democrat-leaning state, rejected the president's notion, citing "its potential impact on the overall stability of our health insurance market. ... We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their policies."

Note that these are the same insurance companies that have done what Obamacare demanded of them, while they often were being vilified by politicians and bureaucrats who haven't done what Obamacare demanded of them: Create workable, economically sustainable, insurance markets. A spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry group, said Thursday that Obama's decree could further drive up prices: "Premiums were set based on assumptions about people transitioning to the (Obamacare) marketplaces," Robert Zirkelbach told The Washington Post. "Changing the rules in the middle of the game could dramatically change who actually signs up. If the exchanges become nothing more than a high-risk pool, that's going to result in massive premium increases for consumers"....

We understand why the president and leaders of his party want to rescue whatever they can of Obamacare. On their watch, official Washington has blown the launch of a new entitlement program ... under the schedule they alone set in early 2010.

What we don't understand is their reluctance to give that failure more than lip service. Many of the Americans who heard their president say Thursday that "we fumbled the rollout of this health care law" would have been pleased to hear him add: So we're admitting it. This law is a bust. We're starting over.

Remember, this is the president's hometown newspaper. Lots of hardcore Obama-cultists will be canceling their subscriptions at the audacity of dissing the dope!

Hat Tip: Instapundit.

The Big Picture on #ObamaCare's Politics

From Jay Cost, at the Weekly Standard:

Unlike Medicare and Social Security, Obamacare creates clear winners and clear losers. Of course, people end up losing in the deals in Medicare and Social Security (e.g. a person who has worked his whole life but dies at the age of 59 and thus never collects), but such people are never actually aware of the loss. Obamacare losers know that they have been made worse off, just as its winners know that they have been made better off.

Losers in the schema include people whose new insurance is more expensive or otherwise less satisfactory because of the new regulations, seniors whose Medicare Advantage program will be peeled back (or whose local hospital stops taking them because of cuts to Part A), businesses who cannot afford the mandates, people who lose their employer insurance as a consequence of the new business mandates, young and health people who, and others. Importantly, the administration's delays speak to the potential coalition of the losers, as almost all of them have been designed to keep these groups from realizing the harm they are due to suffer before the 2014 midterm election.

Two inferences to be drawn from this, one moral and one political.

The moral inference: Shame on the Democrats and the left for setting up Obamacare this way. The people who are losers in this schema have long been protected by both sides in an unwritten political agreement, which vouches that the only people the government "takes" from are those with plenty to spare. The rule was: you do not redistribute money and security away from the middle class to accomplish some policy objective. The Democrats broke this rule, largely out of cowardice. They wanted to hide the trust costs of the legislation. Rather than put together a straightforward tax that hit everybody equally (like the Social Security tax), they created a convoluted system to fund the program, such that people whose premiums have gone up are paying an implicit tax, one that happens not to be collected by the government.

The president deserves particular criticism. The president is the one elected official who can claim to represent all the people and thus has long been the agent to vouchsafe this political bargain. Barack Obama broke the deal, and he lied about it, to boot, with, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

Next time you hear a liberal talking about radical conservatives breaking generations of tradition, remember that Obamacare is actually the break with the past. And a perverse one at that.

The political inference: The politics of this moving forward is a lot more complicated than people on both sides seem to think. This law cannot be repealed in a straightforward manner, nor is it securely in place. That is because there are winners and losers to be mobilized on both sides. The final fate of Obamacare depends upon (a) the relative size and strengths of both groups; (b) how well the two parties bid for their support.

This, then, is the goal for conservatives moving forward. The next week the Democrats and their water carriers in the media will cheer about how Obamacare is vindicated because of 6-7 million "enrollments." Nonsense. The real battle is going to be fought over the next few election cycles, as both sides mobilize their coalitions. Republicans must mobilize the losers and also present an appealing counter-offer to the winners. In any new program put forward by the GOP, people who are made better off under Obamacare must be left at least as well off. Not only that, but the program must be straightforward enough that Obamacare's winners will be able to understand clearly that in the GOP proposal their benefits will not disappear; after all, the Democrats and their friends in the media will do anything and everything to convince these people that they will be made worse off.

Importantly, this was the political landscape of Obamacare six days ago, six weeks ago, six months ago. The bill was bound to create winners and losers by its very design; indeed, a careful read of reports from CBO and CMS at the time of passage indicated that very clearly. The goal for the GOP is to build a coalition that combines the losers, and a critical mass of winners, to replace it with something that is better.

Oh, that oughta be a cakewalk!

Now Is the Time to Delay #ObamaCare

From Peggy Noonan, at WSJ (via Google):

The Obama administration has an implementation problem. More than any administration of the modern era they know how to talk but have trouble doing. They give speeches about ObamaCare but when it's unveiled what the public sees is a Potemkin village designed by the noted architect Rube Goldberg. They speak ringingly about the case for action in Syria but can't build support in the U.S. foreign-policy community, in Congress, among the public. Recovery summer is always next summer. They have trouble implementing. Which, of course, is the most boring but crucial part of governing. It's not enough to talk, you must perform.

There is an odd sense with members of this administration that they think words are actions. Maybe that's why they tweet so much. Maybe they imagine Bashar Assad seeing their tweets and musing: "Ah, Samantha is upset—then I shall change my entire policy, in respect for her emotions!"

That gets us to the real story of last week, this week and the future, the one beyond the shutdown, the one that normal people are both fully aware of and fully understand, and that is the utter and catastrophic debut of ObamaCare. Even for those who expected problems, and that would be everyone who follows government, it has been a shock.

They had 3½ years to set it up! They knew exactly when it would be unveiled, on Oct. 1, 2013. On that date, they knew, millions could be expected to go online to see if they benefit.

What they got was the administration's version of Project ORCA, the Romney campaign's computerized voter-turnout system that crashed with such flair on Election Day.

Here is why the rollout is so damaging to ObamaCare: because everyone in America knows we spent four years arguing about the law, that it sucked all the oxygen from the room, that it commanded all focus, that it blocked out other opportunities and initiatives, and that it caused so many searing arguments—mandatory contraceptive and abortifacient coverage for religious organizations that oppose those things, fears about the sharing of private medical information, fears of rising costs and lost coverage. Throughout the struggle the American people must have thought: "OK, at the end it's gotta be worth it, it's got to give me at least some benefits to justify all this drama." And at the end they tried to log in, register and see their options, and found one big, frustrating, chaotic mess. As if for four years we all just wasted our time.

A quick summary of what didn't work. Those who went on federal and state exchanges reported malfunctions during login, constant error messages, inability to create new accounts, frozen screens, confusing instructions, endless wait times, help lines that put people on hold and then cut them off, lost passwords and user names.

After the administration floated the fiction that the problems were due to heavy usage, the Journal tracked down insurance and technology experts who said the real problems were inadequate coding and flaws in the architecture of the system.

There were no enrollments in Delaware in three days. North Carolina got one enrollee. In Kansas ObamaCare was unable to report a single enrollment. A senior Louisiana state official told me zero people enrolled the first day, eight the second. The founder of McAfee slammed the system's lack of security on Fox Business Network, calling it a hacker's happiest nocturnal fantasy. He predicted millions of identity thefts. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius—grilled, surprisingly, on "The Daily Show"—sounded like a blithering idiot as she failed to justify why, in the middle of the chaos, individuals cannot be granted a one-year delay, just as businesses have been.

More ominously, many of those who got into the system complained of sticker shock—high premiums, high deductibles.

Where does this leave us? Congressional Republicans and the White House may soon begin a series of conversations centering on the debt-ceiling fight. Good: May they turn into negotiations. Republicans are now talking about a grand bargain involving entitlement spending, perhaps tax issues. But they would make a mistake in dropping ObamaCare as an issue. A few weeks ago they mistakenly demanded defunding—a move to please their base. They will be tempted to abandon even the word ObamaCare now, but this is exactly when they should keep, as the center of their message and their intent, not defunding ObamaCare but delaying it. Do they really want to turn abrupt focus to elusive Medicare cuts just when it has become obvious to the American people that parts of ObamaCare (like the ability to enroll!) are unworkable?

The Republicans should press harder than ever to delay ObamaCare—to kick it back, allow the administration at least to create functioning websites, and improve what can be improved...

It needs to be killed, actually. But it might take a couple of elections to do that, but the day is coming.

Still more at that top Google link.

Jonathan Gruber's 'Stupid' Budget Tricks

The totalitarian progs are all, "Nothing to see here. Move along!"

But see WSJ, "His ObamaCare candor shows how Congress routinely cons taxpayers":

#GruberGate basically: a) Exposed Obama as a liar b) Gave the supreme court the underpinnings to gut #Obamacare in the spring.

— RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) November 16, 2014

As a rule, Americans don’t like to be called “stupid,” as Jonathan Gruber is discovering. Whatever his academic contempt for voters, the ObamaCare architect and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his candor about the corruption of the federal budget process.

In his now-infamous talk at the University of Pennsylvania last year, Professor Gruber argued that the Affordable Care Act “would not have passed” had Democrats been honest about the income-redistribution policies embedded in its insurance regulations. But the more instructive moment is his admission that “this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”

Mr. Gruber means the Congressional Budget Office, the institution responsible for putting “scores” or official price tags on legislation. He’s right that to pass ObamaCare Democrats perpetrated the rawest, most cynical abuse of the CBO since its creation in 1974.

In another clip from Mr. Gruber’s seemingly infinite video library, he discusses how he and Democrats wrote the law to game the CBO’s fiscal conventions and achieve goals that would otherwise be “politically impossible.” In still another, he explains that these ruses are “a sad statement about budget politics in the U.S., but there you have it.”

Yes you do. Such admissions aren’t revelations, since the truth has long been obvious to anyone curious enough to look. We and other critics wrote about ObamaCare’s budget gimmicks during the debate, and Rep. Paul Ryan exposed them at the 2010 “health summit.” President Obama changed the subject.

But rarely are liberal intellectuals as full frontal as Mr. Gruber about the accounting fraud ingrained in ObamaCare. Also notable are his do-what-you-gotta-do apologetics: “I’d rather have this law than not,” he says.

Recall five years ago. The White House wanted to pretend that the open-ended new entitlement would spend less than $1 trillion over 10 years and reduce the deficit too. Congress requires the budget gnomes to score bills as written, no matter how unrealistic the assumption or fake the promise. Democrats with the help of Mr. Gruber carefully designed the bill to exploit this built-in gullibility.

So they used a decade of taxes to fund merely six years of insurance subsidies. They made-believe that Medicare payments to hospitals will some day fall below Medicaid rates. A since-repealed program for long-term care front-loaded taxes but back-loaded spending, meant to gradually go broke by design. Remember the spectacle of Democrats waiting for the white smoke to come up from CBO and deliver the holy scripture verdict?

On the tape, Mr. Gruber also identifies a special liberal manipulation: CBO’s policy reversal to not count the individual mandate to buy insurance as an explicit component of the federal budget. In 1994, then CBO chief Robert Reischauer reasonably determined that if the government forces people to buy a product by law, then those transactions no longer belong to the private economy but to the U.S. balance sheet. The CBO’s face-melting cost estimate helped to kill HillaryCare.

The CBO director responsible for this switcheroo that moved much of ObamaCare’s real spending off the books was Peter Orszag, who went on to become Mr. Obama’s budget director. Mr. Orszag nonetheless assailed CBO during the debate for not giving him enough credit for the law’s phantom “savings.”

Then again, Mr. Gruber told a Holy Cross audience in 2010 that although ObamaCare “is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it’s going to lower the cost of health care, that’s all they talk about. Why? Because that’s what people want to hear about because a majority of Americans care about health-care costs.”

More.

And see Gateway Pundit, "BOOM! Gruber White House Meeting Included CBO Director, Robert Gibbs, Axelrod and Barack Obama."

BONUS: "#ObamaCare Architect Exposes Progressive Totalitarianism — And Repsac's Too!"

ObamaCare’s Casualty List

At WSJ, "Three elections later, the law continues to be a political catastrophe for Democrats":

Mary Landrieu ’s defeat in Saturday’s Louisiana Senate runoff was no surprise, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored as inevitable. Ms. Landrieu was a widely liked three-term incumbent, and her GOP foe was hardly a juggernaut, yet she lost by 14 points after Washington Democrats all but wrote her off. Think of Ms. Landrieu as one more Democrat who has sacrificed her career to ObamaCare.

It’s hard to find another vote in modern history that has laid waste to so many political careers. Sixty Democrats cast the deciding 60th vote for the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, but come January only 30 will be left in the Senate. That’s an extraordinary political turnover in merely three elections, the largest in the post-Watergate era. As it happens, the law has been nearly as politically catastrophic for Democrats as Watergate was for Republicans.

Three of the ObamaCare 60 died in office, while 19 declined to run for re-election. Some of the retirees left for reasons such as becoming Secretary of State ( John Kerry ), but others left because their own re-election prospects were hardly stellar. Think Chris Dodd of Connecticut in 2010 or Virginia’s Jim Webb in 2012. At least Democrats succeeded them.

Yet no fewer than eight of the retirees handed their seats to Republicans: They include Ben Nelson, of Cornhusker Kickback fame, who deprived his state of the pleasure of returning him to private life in 2010. After five terms, Jay Rockefeller was increasingly out of step with West Virginia, not least on ObamaCare. Max Baucus (Montana), Tim Johnson (S.D.) and Byron Dorgan (N.D.) would have had rough rides had they tried to stick around.

When they got the chance, voters dumped eight ObamaCare incumbents who dared to seek re-election. In addition to Ms. Landrieu, four are moderate-in-name-only Democrats who went along with President Obama ’s lurch to the left: Mark Begich (Alaska), Kay Hagan (North Carolina), Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor (Arkansas).

But conventional liberals like Russ Feingold (Wisconsin) and Mark Udall (Colorado) also lost in states Mr. Obama carried twice. In Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter left the GOP to vote for ObamaCare after Republican Pat Toomey announced he’d run against him in a primary. Specter, since deceased, lost the Democratic primary to Joe Sestak, who lost to Mr. Toomey in two degrees of ObamaCare separation.

Mr. Obama told Democrats at a March 2010 pep rally that he knew they faced “a tough vote” but was “actually confident” that “it will end up being the smart thing to do politically because I believe that good policy is good politics.” That month, New York Senator Chuck Schumer claimed on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “by November those who voted for health care will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability.”

Mr. Schumer has since recanted, calling ObamaCare a disaster for the party of government. Nancy Pelosi said his remarks were “beyond comprehension,” which for liberals like her happens to be true. Their goal is to expand the entitlement state whether the public likes it or not, figuring that sooner or later enmity will subside and new programs will acquire a constituency. So it has always been in the Entitlement Age—until ObamaCare...

More.

RELATED: At Politico, "The Dems' Final Insult: Landrieu Crushed."

#ObamaCare Employer Mandate Worse Than Feared

At IBD, "ObamaCare Employer Mandate Hurts Low-Wage Workers":

Yet another study purporting to show that ObamaCare hasn't caused many people to work fewer hours has set off another round of high fives among the law's boosters.

But they should hold their applause, because there's a strong case that ObamaCare's employer mandate is worse than its critics feared — though not necessarily for the reasons they expected.

While ObamaCare has clearly had a negative impact on work hours, which one serious flaw of the latest study — counting 29.5-hour workers as full-time — and other data limitations help to obscure, it's fair to say that the law hasn't curtailed full-time work in a big way. But that's because employers have figured out how to dodge liability by offering "affordable" coverage that costs much more than their modest-wage workers are likely to pay.

Gaming The System

This gaming of the system, which ObamaCare rules invite, has serious consequences. A few million full-time, modest-wage workers — and their spouses — have remained uninsured, with many liable for ObamaCare individual mandate penalties. Another roughly 1 million low-wage workers have opted for the kind of coverage that ObamaCare was supposed to do away with: skinny plans that won't cover hospitalization or surgery but will let them avoid a penalty.

Many other full-time, modest-wage workers are getting more comprehensive coverage via their employers — but with $5,000-plus deductibles that could easily torpedo their finances in a health emergency.

These are the direct effects of rules that deny full-time workers access to ObamaCare subsidies — and let employers escape a fine — if they offer bronze-level coverage costing a worker close to 10% of wage income for premiums alone. For a full-time worker earning $17,500, paying $1,670 for bronze coverage qualifies as "affordable." That's $1,000 more than someone at the same income level would have to pay for an exchange plan that caps total out-of-pocket expenses at about $550 in 2016.

Then there are the indirect effects of employer mandate rules that leave so many low-wage, full-time workers with coverage that is of little use...

Still more.

#ObamaCare Sold on a Pack of Lies

I was trying to avoid the whole idiot-gasbag-liar Jonathan Gruber issue (since the fact that lies were used to pass ObamaCare is like so 2009), but if Charles Krauthammer's weighing in ... well, let's just say he's got my vote.

At WaPo, "The Gruber Confession":

Dude RT @jaketapper: Obamacare architect #Gruber in 6th video: 'Mislabeling' helped us get rid of tax breaks http://t.co/DEfjxzAW47

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) November 14, 2014

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” This was no open-mic gaffe. It was a clear, indeed enthusiastic, admission to an academic conference of the mendacity underlying Obamacare.

First, Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.

Worse was the pretense that Obamacare wouldn’t cost anyone anything. On the contrary, it’s a win-win, insisted President Obama, promising that the “typical family” would save $2,500 on premiums every year.

Skeptics like me pointed out the obvious: You can’t subsidize 30 million uninsured without someone paying something. Indeed, Gruber admits, Obamacare was a huge transfer of wealth — which had to be hidden from the American people, because “if you had a law which . . . made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

Remember: The whole premise of Obamacare was that it would help the needy, but if you were not in need, if you liked what you had, you would be left alone. Which is why Obama kept repeating — PolitiFact counted 31 times — that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

But of course you couldn’t, as millions discovered when they were kicked off their plans last year. Millions more were further shocked when they discovered major hikes in their premiums and deductibles. It was their wealth that was being redistributed.

As NBC News and others reported last year, the administration knew this all along. But White House political hands overrode those wary about the president’s phony promise. In fact, Obama knew the falsity of his claim as far back as February 2010, when, at a meeting with congressional leaders, he agreed that millions would lose their plans.

Now, it’s not unconstitutional to lie. Nor are laws enacted by means of deliberate deception thereby rendered invalid. But it is helpful for citizens to know the cynicism with which the massive federalization of their health care was crafted...

Keep reading.

Congress Must Pass Health Care Reform to End the Financial Crises of Everyday Americans — BCRA

I've protested the ObamaCare monstrosity since the summer of 2009.

If we can get the Senate bill passed and legislation approved in conference, we might be well on the way to fixing the system and helping millions of Americans.

Forget the leftist fear-mongering. They're not sharing stories like this with us.

From Tom Price, President Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, and an orthopedic physician trained at the University of Michigan Medical School, at the Wall Street Journal, "ObamaCare’s Victims Need Relief Now":

America faces an urgent crisis in its health-care system. Costs are skyrocketing and choices are disappearing on the individual and small-group markets. Many people now confront the real challenge of having no choice in their health coverage.

One of them is Doug Lake, an Iowa radiologist who came to the White House last week to share his story. His daughter, who suffers from a rare cardiac condition, is covered by an insurer that plans to pull out of ObamaCare’s exchange in their state next year. Only one insurer remains in their county, and that company has requested a 43% increase in premiums.

The situation is even worse elsewhere. As of this week, 49 counties across the country do not have a single insurer offering plans on the exchanges next year.

This year more than 1,000 counties had only one insurer in the ObamaCare market, meaning millions of Americans had no meaningful choice. Meanwhile, the insurers that did stay in the market increased premiums for their midlevel plans by an average of 25%. Premiums on the individual market are up about $3,000 since ObamaCare was implemented. Think about what else that money could buy!

It is too early to know how much premiums will rise next year, but reports so far indicate that double-digit increases again will be the norm.

These are not simply numbers on a page: They represent real people with real stories, facing real health-care and financial crises.

Dudley Bostic, a pharmacy owner in Tennessee, can no longer afford to provide health insurance for her employees because of ObamaCare’s mandates. Candace Fowler, a Missouri homemaker who was recently diagnosed with a serious neurological condition, lives in a county where there are slated to be no insurers selling ObamaCare plans next year. Tommie McClain, a student in Clinton, Mo., who suffers from chronic migraines, faces the possibility of zero choices in his county, too.

The good news is that Congress has the chance to help Doug, Dudley, Candace, Tommie and the millions of other Americans suffering under this law by undoing the damage done by ObamaCare and fulfilling the promises President Trump has made.

The bill recently introduced in the Senate would get rid of the individual mandate, which in 2015 alone caused 6.5 million Americans to pay $3 billion in penalties to the IRS because they did not want or could not afford a government-dictated health plan. It would directly repeal some of ObamaCare’s most costly regulations while giving states flexibility to waive others if they develop innovative ways to provide coverage and bring down costs.

The Senate’s plan also would repeal hundreds of billions of dollars in onerous taxes. It would put Medicaid on a sustainable spending path and give states a real chance to reform the program to make it work for the people who rely on it...

More.

The Left's Skeezy 'Hosurance' #ObamaCare Distraction

At Michelle Malkin's, "Bros and hos: Obamacare’s bread and circuses."

Liberal marketing gurus here in Colorado are masters of Obamacare distraction. While customers struggle to apply through the still-broken health insurance exchange and consumers grapple with cancellation notices, these hipster ad designers are partying it up. Who cares about the insurance market meltdown? They’ve got keg stands and one-night stands!

The “Got Insurance?” campaign is the lame brainchild of two “progressive” outfits with dubious nonprofit status: ProgressNow and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. Their previous claim to fame: a “Thanks, Obamacare” social media movement to propagandize praise and gratitude for the federal mandate.

Modeled after the “Got Milk?” ads, the latest print and web promos pander to young people with pop-culture memes and entitlement-friendly appeals. The dumbed-down website address: doyougotinsurance.com. Last month, while federal and state Obamacare exchange sites 404′ed, the Colorado marketing buffoons LOL’ed. Their “Brosurance” ads featured frat boys with red solo cups guzzling beer, playing golf and celebrating government with a “Thanks, Obamacare!” smile.

ProgressNow’s Alan Franklin boasted about his coverage. Media coverage, that is: “Within the first few weeks, ‘Brosurance’ has been featured by The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, Conan O’Brien, Bill Maher and Roll Call, as well as the front page of Buzzfeed and Jezebel, just to name a few. Just in the first 24 hours of the campaign’s launch alone, #Brosurance was mentioned more than six million times on Twitter, and #GotInsurance more than 1.7 million times. Yes. The ads went viral.” Priorities.

On Tuesday, the groups launched phase two of their Obamacare bread and circuses. Aimed at young women, the ads show party gals with shot glasses lined up on a ski; “Hey, Girl” gags involving a cutout of actor Ryan Gosling; and the Sandra Fluke-inspired promo featuring birth control-wielding “Susie” and her “hot to trot” date, Nate. The caption reads:

“Let’s Get Physical. OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers. I got insurance. Now you can, too.”

It’s bad enough that these idiocracy-targeted ads reduce young people to perpetually partying boozers and traffic-bait boobs. But what’s truly toxic is the ad campaign’s cynical feint to draw attention away from Obamacare’s undeniable harm to responsible young people.

More at the link.

And at AoSHQ, "Progressives' "Brosurance" Ads Are An Embarrassment." And Daniel J. Mitchell, "The Oleaginous Interaction of Sex and Obamacare."