From: Gary L. Bauer
On The Ropes; On The Attack
The Obama Administration is in full attack mode now after suffering through most of October’s disastrous rollout of Obamacare. Today Barack Obama is in Boston delivering yet another speech attempting to rally support for Obamacare as he reels from multiple problems in Washington.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius went before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and also displayed a combative posture.
She repeatedly refused to provide any data about the number of people who have signed up for Obamacare. She claimed that Obamacare wasn’t causing any of the cancellations of individual insurance policies that are now taking place. By the way, the Healthcare.gov site was again offline this morning.
Conservative members of Congress asked some very tough questions. Sebelius was clearly on the defensive when confronted by the fact that Healthcare.gov is not secure and that hundreds of thousands of Americans likely provided their personal financial information on an unsecured site. Watch the exchange here.
What was not made clear in today’s hearing is this central truth: The destruction of the individual insurance market is not an unexpected side effect. The destruction of that market was and is a key goal of Obamacare.
Obamacare only works if millions of middle-class Americans have the policies they like taken away from them and are then forced into Obamacare, where they must pay more expensive premiums covering not only their needs but all the other people who are getting “free” or subsidized insurance from Obama.
Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial clearly outlines the strategy. Here are the key excerpts:
- “The law is systematically dismantling the individual insurance market, as its architects intended from the start.
the individual market works well for millions of people, who can choose from many plans –from Cadillac coverage to cheaper protection against catastrophic illness. The political problem for the White House is that these choices are a threat to ObamaCare.
- “ObamaCare refugees aren’t merely facing higher costs. The plans they want and are willing to pay for have been intentionally outlawed. Ponder that one.
If these middle-class ObamaCare losers can be forced into the exchanges, they become financiers of the new pay-as-you-go entitlement.
- “None of this is an accident. It is the deliberate result of the liberal demand that everyone have essentially the same coverage and that government must dictate what that coverage is and how much it costs. Such political control is the central nervous system of the Affordable Care Act, and it is why so many people can’t keep the insurance they like.”
Obama Administration Was Warned
Barack Obama contends that he didn’t know that the Obamacare website wasn’t going to be ready on time and he’s outraged by the “glitches.” New reports clearly show that the administration was repeatedly warned that Healthcare.gov had not been thoroughly tested and was not ready for prime time.
CNN reports that the administration received “stark warnings” from the lead company, CGI, one month before the October 1st launch. The company warned that there was “not enough time to conduct adequate performance testing,” and that the potential effects would be “significant” and “severe.”
Three weeks later, the administration was again warned that the lack of security testing represented a “high risk.”
Folks, think about it. What was dominating the headlines in the days and weeks leading up to the October 1st launch of Obamacare? The threat of a government shutdown.
Why was the government at risk of shutting down? Because congressional conservatives were demanding that Obamacare be delayed!
Administration officials knew they were right, just couldn’t bring themselves to admit it. Instead they rolled out a defective product, sold under false pretenses, and knowingly put the personal financial information of hundreds of thousands of Americans at “high risk.”
If this happened in the free market, not only would the company be out of business, but its executives would likely be in jail.
Four Pinocchios For False Promises
According to a new Bloomberg News article, 700,000 Californians are finding out that they can’t keep their current health insurance policies no matter how much they liked them.
Adding insult to injury, only one-third are likely to qualify for subsidies in the Obamacare exchange, meaning the vast majority of them will pay significantly more for new coverage.
Today’s Washington Post “Fact Checker” revisits Obama’s oft-repeated promises about being able to keep your current health insurance plans and doctors if you like them. Those “whoppers” earn the worst rating of Four Pinocchios.
The Failed Big Government Model
Big Government does few things well, and integrated healthcare technology clearly isn’t one of them. Unfortunately, government bureaucrats failed to learn from the billion-dollar disaster in electronic health records that was abandoned by the Defense Department and the Veterans Administration earlier this year.
Worse yet, the acolytes of Big Government are refusing help from the private sector!
Representatives from Amazon and Microsoft reached out to the administration to help after Obama touted his so-called “tech surge.” But, according to Reuters, “The Obama administration appears to have passed up offers from Amazon and Microsoft to help fix the federal government’s troubled healthcare enrollment website.”
No doubt many of you are wondering why they would turn down the help. The reason is simple: The Big Government liberals refuse to admit that the private sector/free market works better.
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