Eine Kleine Obamacare Schadenfreude

A fair to middling day here, 40ish and partly sunny but with the promise of a snowstorm tomorrow (3-7 inches was the last estimate) , so we had to spend the morning trying to renew our supplies.  Wouldn't want to run out of bread or toilet paper.

Not much Obamacare Scadenfreude to report, I'm afraid.  The most amusing is this story from the home state, where the Maryland Obamacare website, already known to be one of the worst functioning in the country, sent hundreds of users off to a pottery shop in Seattle:

The website mistakenly listed a 1-800 number that sent some Marylanders attempting to pick a health insurance provider to Seattle Pottery Supply instead of Maryland's call center. The number appears under the words "State Advantage" and "call a representative." The correct number for help shows up multiple times on the site before the incorrect number appears.

A state spokeswoman said Saturday that she had no update on efforts to fix the problem. Maryland officials were unaware of the problem until contacted Friday by The Baltimore Sun.

It is unreported whether or not the pottery supply could provide better service than the State of Maryland. It's hard to imagine they did worse.

The administration managed to find a new deadline in Obamacare to delay in the ever continuing game of Calvinball: Another Obamacare provision for employers delayed

The Obama administration plans to delay enforcement of yet another Obamacare provision, according to a New York Times report.

This line in the law would ban employers from discriminating “in favor of highly compensated individuals” when it comes to health insurance eligibility or benefits. Effectively, the provision prevents employers from providing their top executives cushy health benefits while low-level employees are given less optimal health insurance options.

The IRS will not enforce the provision in 2014 because they simply haven’t yet gotten around to actually writing the regulations that employers must follow, even though the Affordable Care Act was signed into law almost four years ago.

A bit of anti-schadenfreude (or perhaps just schaden sans freude), as Smitty of The Other McCain fame, worries about the steadfastness of the GOPs commitment to  opposing Obamacare: Stand By For GOP Disaster On ObamaCare

Pardon the pessimism, but the GOP seems to differ with the Administration more on style than substance, as Hayward notes at Breitbart:

…indications are that the Republicans are backing away from ObamaCare, or at least from efforts to kill it. Jon Terbush at The Week delivered the news in an article entitled “It’s Official: The Republicans Are Done Trying to Kill ObamaCare.” Actually, the body of the article makes it sound more like the GOP leadership still wants to repeal, or mostly repeal, ObamaCare and replace it with a Republican alternative proposal, which is more a change of tactics than strategy.
“In that light, simply saying that an official GOP alternative is on the way is a big step away from the nihilistic rhetoric of the past,” writes Terbush.
But their rhetoric was never entirely nihilistic; that’s a false Obama talking point echoed robotically by the media. There have been solid GOP alternatives since Day One of the ObamaCare disaster. It sounds as if the Republican leadership wants to bring the entire party together behind something they can officially brand as The Republican Alternative ™ and push with a united effort. Until now, some strategists have suggested that would be a mistake, because it would give the Democrats and their media allies a target to demolish, drawing attention away from ObamaCare’s failure. It sounds like the time for standing back and letting Americans get a taste of the nightmare souffle whipped up by the Administration’s gremlins – supposedly with nearly zero oversight from the Smartest President In History – is over, and the GOP wants an alternative they can run on.
The troubling thing about Terbush’s article are the indications that groups like the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce are giving up the fight and making their peace with ObamaCare as a permanent tumor in the American system.

The over-arching, fundamental, intrinsic problem with ObamaCare is that it was Ever. The. Government’s. Constitutional. Job. To. Pull. This. Stunt.

This country is riddled with little brain-dead proto-Commies who think “liberty” means getting the government out of the womb and into the wallet. Wow, that sentence looks stupid, but it seems a fair assessment of the idiocy under consideration.

Getting into blogging a half decade ago was about joining the chorus of Buckley wannabees, standing athwart history asking: “Why’re they calling me a thwart? And why’s Obama prescribing the IRS as a treatment for thwarts?”