Challenge

One Bite At A Time, Right?

Playing the Reid Card

Republicans Would Repeal Obamacare In Precisely The Way They Accuse Democrats Of Enacting It
Secret negotiating, misrepresentation and a rush to judgment — yep, it’s all there.

"The story that Obamacare opponents tell about its enactment is that backers conceived the health insurance proposal in secret, misled the public about its provisions, and passed it without thinking through the consequences.

That’s a totally accurate account ― of what Republicans are planning to do right now."

Goose/Gander. Donks reap what they sowed.

In reality, it's just the same process, but in reverse. Like unscrewing a screw, where the US got screwed, and will - hopefully - get unscrewed.

Obama's Legacy Failure: ObamaCare Careens Off The Tracks and Into the Swamp of Oblivion

GOP rebuffs Obama's entreaties to fix health law

In a rare lucid moment, Obama realizes that his legacy is going down in flames (metaphor #2). The disaster is purely Democrat caused, and a skeptic might think it to be on purpose. The drive toward single payer nationalized insurance is the dream of the Hillary camp, and that would be worse yet. If that's possible. But it's the next step in the Leftist Hegelian antithesis strategy.

President Barack Obama on Thursday called for Republicans next year to pass legislation to repair Obamacare. The GOP response? No.

Democrats have long held out hope that with a new president, the political winds would shift, creating an opening to pass badly needed legislative repairs.

But Republicans have been bashing Obamacare for more than six years and there is no sign that they’re going to break that habit — let alone vote for legislative repairs. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that the law “can’t be fixed.”

Obamacare is the reason “we’ve seen record premium hikes,” Ryan said in a statement. “That's why millions of people—including millennials—have lost their plans, or been forced to buy plans they don’t like. That's why we've seen waste, fraud, and abuse. And at this point, one thing is clear: This law can't be fixed.

The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to a) insure pre-existing conditions for which the insured have not paid anything into the system, and b) burden the system with mountains of regulations on Doctors and hospital systems.

I lost my own doctor this year, a victim of ObamaCare due to loss of ability to support her clinic under the additional costs of ObamaCare. It's not just the insurance costs doubling that's the problem. The problem extends to all facets of healthcare, which is overloaded with government requirements, and the costs for that government expansion. There's no way that ObamaCare could NOT increase costs at all points in the process of healthcare.

But it's failure will not stop the Left from driving toward single-payer, government healthcare, where everyone gets the same schlock healthcare except for the very wealthy, who will have private health communes or some such. Leftism always, always rewards the very wealthy while claiming to do the opposite. That's the "private position" Hillary talks about, as she and Bill drive toward being billionaires, by selling political access.

Here's ObamaCare's main accomplishment:

Fewer Americans Have Private Health Insurance Now Than in 2007

Note that this includes millennials.

Not On the Evening News: ObamaCare Is Dying Despite Secret Taxpayer-funded Transfusions

ObamaCare is entering its dreaded ‘death spiral’

By Betsy McCaughey

The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.

Last Thursday, the administration predicted enrollment for 2016 will be less than half what the Congressional Budget Office predicted in March.

Despite subsidies to help with premiums and out-of-pocket costs, most of the uninsured who are eligible for ObamaCare are saying “no thanks.” Only one in seven is expected to sign up. That’s despite a hefty increase in the financial penalty next year for not having insurance.

The president sees the writing on the wall. You won’t be seeing the customary nationwide TV campaign to encourage sign-ups, as there were in previous years. Remember the young guy in plaid pajamas — “Pajama Boy,” to conservatives — well, he won’t be back this winter.

Bad enough that healthy people aren’t buying. Worse is that the administration is spending billions of your tax dollars covering up the problem, paying insurers to keep offering the plans, even though they’re losing their shirts. But facts are facts — and there’s no hiding these.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell predicts ObamaCare enrollment will inch up by 1 million or so, to 10 million people — half what the CBO forecasted. Open enrollment for the coming year, which begins Nov. 1, “is going to be a challenge,” she said.

David Wichmann, UnitedHealth Group’s president, announced higher premiums last week because enrollees will “require more medical services than original expectations.”

Many states (though not New York) are looking at premium hikes of 30 percent or more, according to a new Robert Wood Johnson/Urban Institute analysis. The Heritage Foundation estimates that insurers lost 12 percent selling ACA plans in 2014, with more losses this year.

Don’t shed any tears for the insurance companies. Though they’re losing money on exchange plans, overall they’re profitable and their stocks are doing well. It’s John Q. Public who’s bearing the brunt. Just as ObamaCare intended.

If you get insurance at work, you’re paying an extra tax to fund “reinsurance” for ObamaCare plans. It’s a fund to defray the cost of their most expensive enrollees.

So far, insurers have collected about $7.9 billion. Recent congressional testimony shows the payments kept ObamaCare sticker prices about 11 percent lower than they otherwise would have been. In short, you pay a tax to make ObamaCare look more affordable than it is.

But even with these hidden subsidies, ObamaCare isn’t working because the design is fatally flawed. The 5 percent of the population with serious medical conditions consume nearly 50 percent of the health care. When you try to sell insurance to sick and healthy people for the same price, the healthy don’t sign up. It’s too expensive.

New York state learned that in the 1990s, when one-price-for-all insurance laws pushed premiums to the highest in the nation, crushing the individual insurance market here.

ObamaCare repeats that mistake. Despite slapping the uninsured with penalties — which will jump to 2.5 percent of household income in 2016 — they’re not signing up. The need to coerce enrollment with penalties is proof the plans are a bad deal.

How long will big insurers play along? There are political considerations, and for most, ObamaCare losses are still just a dent in their overall business. Not so for the 23 co-op insurers set up under the health law. Eight state plans have already failed, including New York’s Health Republic, and most of the rest are bleeding money.

With ObamaCare enrollment floundering and losses mounting, the nation needs alternatives. The Republicans are coalescing around a reform plan, but Democrats are doubling down. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to burden the existing, unpopular plans with more “free” goodies, and make it harder to dodge the mandate. That won’t work.

A real reform would cover the seriously ill — people with pre-existing conditions — in separate plans with separate pricing and subsidies to make them affordable.

Just like the high-risk pools many states used to maintain. That’s the lesson of the failing ObamaCare scheme.

Betsy McCaughey is the author of “Beating ObamaCare” and a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.

ObamaCare About to Eat Itself From the Inside?

The video of an ObamaCare architect admitting to the necessity of obscuring the bill and needing the stupidity of voters has generated a "butterfly effect" in the history of ObamaCare. The video prompted a tsunami of further investigation into the actions of the architect and the language in the bill, and has revealed a defect which will be very useful in the "King v. Burwell" case, which will wind up in the US Supreme Court.

The details surround the individual state's formation of exchanges; those states which did not form exchanges would have their citizens punished financially to the point where millions might lose their insurance. This sort of punitive discrimination could stop the law cold in its tracks, unless Congress opts to change the wording of the law. Congress could do that, or Congress could do nothing (mimicking Harry Reid mode), and let the law die. Even in the lame duck Congress, the House could merely sit on its hands and watch the fun.

It's so ironic. By not reading the bill before it was passed to catch such things, the law itself could commit suicide by discrimination, written right into it by its architects. How about that, Pelosi? Looking back on this period in a few years, one suspects that it might look quite comical and the Dems will look especially ludicrous.