The ‘No Excuse’ Administration Has a Whopper of an Excuse for Obamacare
By John Fund
...But there was also this startling explanation of what went wrong at HHS:
“We
talked about having testing going forward, and if we had an ideal
situation and could have built a product and, you know, a five-year
period of time, we probably would have taken five years but we didn’t
have five years. And certainly, Americans who rely on health coverage
didn’t have five years for us to wait. We wanted to make sure we made
good on this final implementation of the law.”
Well, okay, she
only had three and a half years since Obamacare became law in early 2010
to oversee the design of the exchanges and the website accompanying
them. So now she tells us she needed five years. Bruce Webster, a noted
IT consultant to many companies, is stunned that Sebelius thinks “that
‘we needed five years but only had two’ is somehow an excuse for this
disaster. That’s like Boeing saying, ‘We know the plane crashed, but we
needed four years to build it and a year to test it, but we only had two
years.’ Color me boggled.”
By Steve Contorno
...Asked Tuesday how Congress could help improve the system by which
millions of Americans must buy insurance by the end of the year, the
House minority whip and Maryland Democrat said, "We can give them a
little money."
"[Republicans have] been pretty much focused in the House of
Representatives on undermining the implementation of the Affordable Care
Act in every which way that we possibly could," he said.
Hoyer admitted that he does not know whether the project, which has
already cost more than $400 million, has faced funding problems. "I
don't think that's the reason," he said. "If I know that, I'll blame
it."
By Chris Cillizza
...Stewart dedicated the entire first 10 minutes of his show — three full
segments — on Monday to slashing hits on the Web site and the
president’s handling of the problems.
....Who cares what a late night comedian/talk show host thinks? President
Obama should if viewership details on Stewart’s show are right.
According to a 2012 Pew Research Center poll,
“The Daily Show” has the second largest share of young viewers — aged
18-29 — of any of the 24 media outlets tested. (The only one with a
higher number of young viewers was the “Colbert Report”.)
By Andrew Malcolm
According to Kathleen Sebelius, Barack Obama knew nothing, absolutely
nothing, about the fundamental problems with the Oct. 1 roll-out of his
namesake legislation that will affect nearly one-fifth of the nation's
economy.
He didn't know about the last-minute test of the website
expected to handle millions of customers and how it had crashed when
only a few hundred samplers tried to get on at the same time. He had no
idea that IT people had been expressing deep concerns for months that
the site costing hundreds of millions of dollars was being constructed
like an "Our Gang" clubhouse.
According to former Gov. Sebelius, the president of the United States
was totally unaware that anything was wrong with ObamaCare for "a
couple of days" after the bungled launch. A couple of days? Seriously?
...So, how could this Harvard grad, who's supposed to be so smart except
when he's conveniently clueless, be oblivious to opening day of this
mammoth legislative heave that cost his party the House of
Representatives in 2010 and could well turn top Senate Democrat Harry
Reid into a former majority leader next year?
By M Catharine Evans
What's going to happen when Obama's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and chief of staff Denis McDonough meet with insurance company executives on Wednesday?
...Will
the CEO's knuckle under before their Boards push them out the door
for allowing the President to destroy their businesses? Will Jarrett and
McDonough threaten them with the IRS and the NSA if they don't agree to
artificially lower the costs until after the midterm elections?
Will insurance companies be asked for voluntary contributions to fix the mess? HHS Secretary Sebelius tried to shake them down for donations to help fund the Obamacare PR campaign last spring.
Top Ten Obamacare Disasters to Come
Obamacare’s digital issues are just the beginning.
By Grace-Marie Turner
The problems increasingly are going to be up close and personal, as
people see for themselves the impact it has on their lives and
pocketbooks. The top ten debacles to come:
1. Deductible shock: When
consumers finally do get onto the Healthcare.gov website, they are in
for a new kind of sticker shock. Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute has
exposed the high cost of Obamacare premiums — the next price shock will be the whopping cost of the deductibles.
By Michelle Malkin
Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, a Philadelphia orthopedic surgeon, has a timely
reminder for everyone encountering the federal health care exchange
meltdown: "If you think signing up for Obamacare is a nightmare, ask
your doctor how the EMR mandate is going."
Bingo.
...As I reported last year, Obamacare's top-down, tax-subsidized,
job-killing, privacy-undermining electronic record-sharing scheme has
been a big fat bust. More than $4 billion in "incentives" has been doled
out to force doctors and hospitals to convert and upgrade by 2015. But
favored EMR vendors, including Obama bundler Judy Faulkner's Epic
Systems, have undermined rather than enhanced interoperability.
Oversight remains lax. And after hyping the alleged benefits for nearly a
decade, the RAND Corporation finally 'fessed up that its cost-savings
predictions of $81 billion a year -- used repeatedly to support the
Obama EMR mandate -- were (like every other Obamacare promise) vastly
overstated.
In June, the Annals of Emergency Medicine published a study warning that
the "rush to capitalize on the huge federal investment of $30 billion
for the adoption of electronic medical records led to some unfortunate
and unintended consequences" tied to "communication failure, poor data
display, wrong order/wrong patient errors and alert fatigue." Also this
summer, Massachusetts reported that 60 percent of doctors could not meet
the EMR mandate and face potential loss of their licenses in 2015. And a
few weeks ago, the American College of Physicians pleaded with the feds
to delay the mandate's data collection, certification and reporting
requirements.
...Let me underscore that again: Doctors face steep penalties if they can't
meet the radical technology goals imposed by the very same
glitch-plagued Obamacare bureaucrats who now need an emergency "tech
surge" to fix their own failed info-tech Titanic. The Obamacare wrecking
ball has only just begun.
By Dr. Susan Berry
Defenders of President Obama’s signature health reform legislation claim
the states that put effort into establishing their own exchanges,
mostly Democrat-led, are signing people up successfully for ObamaCare. A
new report, however, indicates that most of the individuals signing up
in these state-run exchanges are enrolling into Medicaid.
Rachana Dixit at InsideHealthPolicy wrote
Tuesday that enrollment into Medicaid in many of the state-run
exchanges is “significantly outpacing the number of people that so far
have enrolled into qualified health plans.” Medicaid enrollment numbers,
Dixit observed, have reached tens of thousands in states such as
Maryland, Washington, and Oregon.
By John Nolte
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein now admits that weeks before the disastrous ObamaCare launch, he heard "some very ugly things about how the system was performing[.]" We also now know that a few hundred people were involved in a test that crashed the site days before the launch and that insurance companies were complaining about the site before the launch. On top of all that, we are now seeing story after story
about the red flags ignored by the Administration. But it isn't just
the White House claiming to be caught off guard by The Obvious, it is
also a useless American media that seems incapable of breaking stories
embarrassing to this president.
...Once again, despite numerous red flags, our media claims to be as
surprised by a major scandal as the rest of the America. This isn’t the
first major Obama White House scandal the media failed to break. The
NSA, Associated Press, IRS, and Benghazi scandals were all missed by an American mainstream media
that apparently spends its days spinning for the White House instead of
engaging in the kind of investigative journalism into it that might
result in revelations they don't want to know about or report.
By Brent Bozell
The numbers are in for the evening news coverage of the shutdown. During
the first 15 nights of October, ABC, CBS and NBC blamed the Republicans
41 times for the shutdown, blamed both sides 17 times, and blamed Obama
and the Democrats ... never.
By William Bigelow
In a bombshell revelation,
a consumer sales manager for North Dakota’s largest health insurer said
Monday that the Obama Administration asked Blue Cross Blue Shield of
North Dakota to hide how many people registered for health insurance
through an online exchange that just went up.
By Howard Richman
Like me, Morici described the settlement as a "shakedown":
"The president is shaking down JPMorgan. There's no other word for it," Morici told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"They
started investigating these mortgage-related securities fraud ... about
the time that Morgan ... decided not to support the president in his
re-election campaign. How about that?"
Morici says the Justice Department targeted JPMorgan Chase
even though "most of the sins were committed by companies it acquired
at the behest of the Bush Treasury Department," including Bear Stearns
and Washington Mutual.
Morici predicted more shakedowns in the future:
"You
can count on more shakedowns. It would be a felony for me to, for
example, threaten you with fraud to get the upper hand in a civil
complaint, but not so the attorney general," he said.
In an interview with Univision that
aired in October 2010, President Obama once said, "We're going to
punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us
on issues that are important to us."
By Fred Lucas
President Barack Obama’s rhetoric
toward conservative nonprofits inspired the Internal Revenue Service to
target Tea Party groups, a broad lawsuit against the IRS alleges.
“The president of the United States
gave the IRS a road map to investigate the tea party in the United
States,” David French, senior counsel to the conservative American
Center for Law and Justice told TheBlaze.
...The ACLJ is representing 41 Tea Party and patriot groups from 22 states,
claiming the IRS committed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by
blocking or delaying their applications for tax exempt status. The suit
does not name Obama as a co-defendant, but includes him in the
narrative of what led to the alleged abuses from the agency.
...The plaintiffs’ complaint states: “The
White House, congressional Democrats and the liberal media increasingly
criticized the IRS for allowing conservative groups to exercise their
First Amendment rights as tax exempt organizations and demanding that
for those groups, the IRS should adopt more rigorous standards than
applied to, for example, the Barack H. Obama Foundation.”
It continues, “IRS employees,
including political employees to the IRS, eager to please their
benefactors or kindred spirits forced plaintiffs applications into a
Byzantine process, harassed them and systematically deprived them of
their right to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”
By Patrick Howley
White House
and State Department officials cooperated extensively on background
with a New York Times journalist during the period that he broke
confidential national security information in a series of leaks that
prompted outrage from lawmakers, according to unearthed 2011 and 2012
emails.
The nonprofit organization Freedom Watch, which obtained the internal
State Department emails through a Freedom of Information Act request,
believes that the Obama administration carried out the leaks to bolster a tough image for itself on Iran.
By Victor Keith
Congress is closing down Thursday to attend the funeral
of Representative C.W. Bill Young, a Republican from Florida who passed
away October 18, 2013. Now many may not mind that Congress is closing
for a day because, firstly, we are used to paying them for doing nothing
and, secondly, the less work they do, the less damage to the country
they cause.
What
should bother most taxpayers, however, is that the Air Force is going
to provide transportation for members of Congress to fly them all to
Florida to attend the services. Defense Department spokesmen could not
comment on what the costs of this operation would be.
So
it seems, even while bemoaning the increasing national debt and
out-of-control spending, Congress is still incapable of reaching into
their own pockets to pay their personal bills.
By Michael Bargo, Jr.
...If
this entire discussion seems rather tedious, it is only because
government, and in particular the federal government, has entangled its
administrative power with Constitutional corruption to enable themselves
to dominate America's social and political fabric.
The
tendency of governments to seize property without court hearings is one
of the three abuses of individual rights that motivated the Fifth
Amendment. As government grows and encroaches upon individual rights
there is no doubt that while it may not yet be able to seize property
without due process, every day more regulations are written by the Obama
Administration that allow it to seize money without due process.
Legal
foundations should take it upon themselves to challenge federal
administrative guidelines and bring this issue to the Supreme Court. If
the time ever comes when money is defined as property by the Supreme
Court bureaucratic powers will be greatly weakened. The government's
ability to seize the wealth of Americans and transfer it to themselves
will be severely curtailed.
By John Stossel
What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent
$35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You'd
tell him to get his act together -- stop spending so much or he'd
destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of
course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long.
But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook
for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government.
Yet when Congress and President Obama agreed on a deal last week to
raise the debt ceiling and resume government spending, people reacted as
if a disaster was averted -- instead of reacting as if a disaster had
resumed. It has. And it continues.
By Robert Weissberg
As
the recent federal "shutdown" and the possibility of Washington
defaulting on its debt fade into history, the chattering class turns to
preventing future similar crises. The consensus is that "something is
broken" (usually thanks to the demonic Tea Partiers) and therefore
should be fixed. Nothing is broken; today's critics just need some
history lessons regarding the U.S. Constitution and how far current
political understandings have strayed from what our Constitution
permits.
The
Constitution was never designed to facilitate curing the ills of
society -- creating a government to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and
otherwise march to Utopia on the installment plan. The pursuit of such
lofty aims is not explicitly forbidden; rather, those admirable aims are
not the Constitution's paramount purpose. If the Founders wanted a
government capable of fixing our ills by decree they would have
instituted an absolute monarchy and then hoped for the best.
PK'S NOTE: I'm beginning to think this is the way to go. We've given it two elections already.
By Kathleen Gotto
...All three branches
of the federal government have seized our inheritance to the point
where now we citizens are the ones who support and defend the
Constitution, and career politicians and judges are destroying what is
left of it.
It
is indisputable that the Republican Party offers no united opposition
to the tyrannical Left. Indeed, in the recent government shutdown
fiasco, Republican senators repudiated their fellow House Republicans
and stood against them with the Democrats. That action was a slap in the
face to not just those Republicans trying to rein in the Left's
disastrous fiscal policies, but to all Americans who are concerned about
the socialist agenda that is destroying our nation. The question before
us is what to do about it.
...There
are two major schools of thought on what should be done. One is to
change the Republican Party from within. However, the Establishment
members have been so long entrenched in their power positions that there
is no way they will just move aside and let the conservative members
assume positions of leadership in the party.
...Many
people evince abject fear that third parties will only split the vote
and hand victory to the Democrats. But we need to ask ourselves if the
end result of a split vote is any different from the result of millions
of voters staying away from the polls? More voters will continue to stay
away if they are not offered a candidate who has strong conservative
values.
...Would
there be risks in establishing a third party? Of course. We may lose an
election or two until a New Republican Party becomes established.
However, by that time the old Republican Party may very well have become
the third party. That can happen if we unite, rise up, and help it meet
its destiny on the rag heap of history.
Let
it sink in: We are not going to change the Republican Party. We need a
New Republican Party that represents millions of Americans all across
this country. We don't have such a party now. A New Republican Party
name acknowledges what the old party once stood for and what a new party
will uphold. It comprises both name recognition and name
differentiation, and throws down the gauntlet to the status quo and
inertia facing us. This is not just a political issue, but one that
touches our very existence and fundamental freedoms.
...If
we conservatives can honestly acknowledge that we are on the ropes and
have nowhere else to go, that can be the first step to change. It is
either allow Establishment Republicans to continue leading us by the
nose, or come out swinging with all we've got, come hell or high water.
By Sara Carter
Nine senior commanding generals have
been fired by the Obama administration this year, leading to speculation
by active and retired members of the military that a purge of its
commanders is underway.
Retired generals and current senior
commanders that have spoken with TheBlaze say the administration is not
only purging the military of commanders they don’t agree with, but is
striking fear in the hearts of those still serving.
...“Obama will not purge a civilian or political appointee because they
have bought into Obama’s ideology,” Vallely said. “The White House
protects their own. That’s why they stalled on the investigation into
fast and furious, Benghazi and Obamacare. He’s intentionally weakening
and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing us as a superpower, and
anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.”
By Dave Urbanski
But while relations appear strained, it looks as though diplomatic ties haven’t been severed just yet.
According to a Reuters article, ”Saudi Arabia warns of shift away from U.S. over Syria, Iran,” which the Daily Mail bases its headline on.
Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief says the longtime U.S. ally will
initiate a “major shift” in relations with the U.S. in protest of
perceived inaction regarding Syria’s civil war and recent U.S.
discussions with Iran, according to a source close to Saudi policy.
By Ben Shapiro
...Charges of racism have echoed from nearly every left-leaning mouth of
late. Opposition to Obamacare: racist. Opposition to President Obama on
the shutdown: racist. Don't like the president's tie-shirt combination?
Racist.
This is not what Americans were promised. What's worse, it's
un-American drivel. Ascribing racial motives to those who have none has
become a near pathological condition among those on the left who cannot
come to terms that their beloved leader's second term is a policy
disaster. Racism is the last bullet in the leftist arsenal. And they're
running out of ammo quickly.
By Thomas Sowell
...But that is no reason why the Washington Redskins should succumb to those pressures.
Among the reasons why they should not is the fact that being offended
is one of the tactics of a race hustling industry that is doing more
harm to Indians and other minorities than any name is likely to do. Some
people are in the business of being offended, just as Campbell is in
the business of making soup.
...So long as the race industry -- the Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons, and
their counterparts in various minorities -- can get political or
financial mileage out of being offended, they are going to be offended.
The only thing that will put a stop to this racket is refusing to be
taken in by it or intimidated by it.
...Young blacks are especially susceptible to the message that all their
problems are caused by white people -- and that white society is never
going to give them a chance. In short, they are primed to resent and
hate individuals they have never seen before and who have never done a
thing to them.
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