Snowy Day Obamacare Schadenfreude

First, some world class Schadenfreude:

Obamacare raises Harry Reid's Insurance $4,500

. . . Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Steve Tetreault of the Stephens News Bureau (Review-Journal) that Reid’s move “is the clearest example yet of Obamacare’s failures and Washington hypocrisy. His staff worked to pass it and continue to promote it, now they don’t want to be part of it because it’s a disaster.”

Reid mentioned Cruz during the interview in Reno.

"I was really troubled when Ted Cruz complained. That really hurt me to the core,” Reid said. “The only people complaining are those who don’t like the Obamacare. I followed the law."And I will also note that there are 150,000 million different families that get their health care through their employees," Reid said. "So should all federal employees, although under Obamacare, my insurance costs me about $4,500 more that it did before. Yes, because it is age-related and it wasn’t like that before.”

If it's good bad enough for the rest of America, it should be good bad enough for federal workers, especially the ones who wrote, and pushed this dog.

Even solidly blue California is turning on Obamacare

. . . In February, 62% of Californians approved of the job performance of the White House's top golfer. During Obama's entire presidency his California approval was higher only once, 65% just 60 days into the job, Field reports.

Today, barely a majority of California's registered voters approve (51%). In February, 33% disapproved of Obama's job. Today, 43% disapprove. That's the worst since 44% in autumn of 2011.

 Feds warn Obamacare Insurance buyers not to use paper applications:

Federal health officials, after encouraging alternate sign-up methods amid the fumbled rollout of their online insurance website, began quietly urging counselors around the country this week to stop using paper applications to enroll people in health insurance because of concerns those applications would not be processed in time.

. . .

"We received guidance from the feds recommending that folks apply online as opposed to paper," said Mike Claffey, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Insurance.

After a conference call earlier this week with federal health officials, Illinois health officials sent a memo Thursday to their roughly 1,600 navigators saying there is no way to complete marketplace enrollment through a paper application. The memo, which Claffey said was based on guidance from federal officials, said paper applications should be used only if other means aren't available.

And if you don't have a computer, or trust the websites with your personal information?

And a reminder via Instapundit:

A PEARL HARBOR DAY OUCH: “We reduced Japan to a pile of radioactive smoking rubble in 1,346 days. It’s now Day 1,355 and, despite promises to do likewise to the healthcare system, they’re still working on it. The FDR administration built almost a hundred working aircraft carriers faster than the Obama administration has managed to build one working website.”

But good news (TM) from the website.  In October and November, only 25% of the web applications contained errors! A gentleman's C-. . .

After refusing for weeks to detail the extent of back-end problems with healthcare.gov, the Obama administration on Friday said a technical bug affected approximately 25 percent of enrollments on the federal exchanges in October and November.

Those technical bugs, separate from the troubles consumers had experienced accessing information on the website during the first two months, are posing a significant new problem for those who signed up and are expecting insurance coverage come Jan. 1.

One in four of those applications either did not get transferred to insurers, were transferred in duplicate form, or had major errors in information shared.

Supposedly, they're down to a mere 10% error rate currently. Oh well, good enough for government work.

There is something to look forward to, however:  Obama has shown how a future GOP president can gut Obamacare

Obama has turned his signature legislative accomplishment into a constantly evolving wikilaw, with editing privileges restricted to himself and a few administration officials. He’s largely been able to get away with it due to the difficulties posed by gaining standing in court for legal challenges.

As businesses barked about the requirement that they provide qualifying health insurance or pay a fine, Obama decided not enforce the law’s employer mandate in 2014, even though the law explicitly states that’s when it’s supposed to kick in.

As technological problems mounted, HHS delayed the implementation of some income verification requirements for those applying for federal health insurance subsidies, without delaying the subsidies.

When Big Labor griped about a “reinsurance fee” that would be imposed on some union health care plans, HHS simply redefined the universe of health plans subject to the fee so that it excluded unions — forcing others to provide the lost revenue.

In the face of a public backlash over millions of Americans having their health insurance policies cancelled despite the president’s repeated assurances that it wouldn’t happen, Obama announced that he simply wouldn’t enforce the requirements on insurance policies that are clearly spelled out in the law.

With insurers complaining that Obama's “administrative fix” to plan cancellations could pose unanticipated costs, HHS has now proposed altering a provision of Obamacare known as the “risk corridors” program to funnel more money to the industry.

but, what comes around in politics tends to go around...

A Republican president, through regulatory action and enforcement discretion, could also reduce the number of federal benefit mandates that are imposed on insurance policies.

If the administration wanted to go further, a Republican HHS secretary could potentially issue a revised Internal Revenue Service ruling eliminating health insurance subsidies on the federally run exchanges, in accordance with the actual text of Obamacare.

Though a lot will depend on how implementation goes over the next several years and what the politics of health care looks like in 2017, Obama has provided his potential Republican successor with a path to fight Obamacare through executive action.

 Obamacare's three phases of fail:

Phase 1, the technical failure, might have been avoided had the administration had some basic standards of competence. But Phases 2 and 3 are inherent in the law.

Phase 2 was the revelation that the ObamaCare enterprise is the most massive consumer fraud in American history--that the "if you like your plan, you can keep it" sales pitch was not only false but deliberately deceptive, and also that ObamaCare forces insurance companies to engage in dishonest practices such as selling maternity coverage to men and postmenopausal women.
...
Assuming that the politics of ObamaCare remain static--that is, assuming Senate Democrats continue to fear the president more than they fear their constituents--Phase 3 will develop over the coming months. Phase 3 is the demonstration that even if the system is technically functional and the fraud impervious to redress, ObamaCare is economically unviable because of adverse selection: Americans who stand to benefit from the law's price controls, the old and the sick, will buy insurance in large numbers, while those who get hit by them, the young and the healthy, will not.