Obamacare Schadenfreude on Sunny Saturday Morning

Whoa!  Another sunny day here in slower Maryland, with temperature rocketing right up near 50 F (supposedly; while it looks nice, it's still only 34 out here).  Still, any day above ground...

Of course, the big non-news of the week in Obamacare Schadenfreude is that Nancy Pelosi (D), former speaker of the House when Obamacare was railroaded through, hasn't got a clue, as illustrated with this video of her answering Jon Leibowitz Stewart's question about the implementation failures (clown nose off).

Clown nose back on.

The finest Schadenfreude of the day though, has to be this complaint by union leaders that Obama and the democrats betrayed them by not giving them their Obamacare exemptions:

Labor union officials say Obama betrayed them in health-care rollout

Labor leaders who have spent months lobbying unsuccessfully for special protections under the Affordable Care Act warned this week that the White House’s continued refusal to help is dampening union support for Democratic candidates in this year’s midterm elections.

Leaders of two major unions, including the first to endorse Obama in 2008, said they have been betrayed by an administration that wooed their support for the 2009 legislation with promises to later address the peculiar needs of union-negotiated insurance plans that cover millions of workers.
. . .
“We want to hold the president to his word: If you like your health-care coverage, you can keep it, and that just hasn’t been the case,” said Donald “D.” Taylor, president of Unite Here, the union that represents about 400,000 hotel and restaurant workers and provided a crucial boost to Obama by endorsing him just after his rival Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the New Hampshire primary.

He doesn't need you any more:


Why do the democrats and media hate women?  Women's Resource Center closes in Fort Collins, citing Obamacare:

The Fort Collins nonprofit, which has provided a wide array of bilingual health and human services primarily for uninsured or underinsured women, has operated in Larimer County since 1975. Its programs focused on prevention of breast, cervical, ovarian and reproductive cancers, dental health and diabetes education and mental health services.

“The perception among many of our previous grantors seemed to be that Obamacare would now be able to provide for all women’s health needs,” the nonprofit’s board said in a written statement released Friday. “We started to develop a program to provide short-term crisis management for women who needed assistance with prioritizing and finding solutions to many of life’s difficulties, especially mental health issues.”

Governments hate charity; it makes people appreciate someone else as the source of goodness.

Back in Oregon, the Governor is in hot water because it appears he may have lied about how much he knew about the impending failure of "Cover Oregon", the state's Obamacare excange website:

Earlier this month, Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon insisted that he and his office got blindsided by the nation’s biggest ObamaCare exchange flop, Cover Oregon. The web portal never successfully launched despite Kitzhaber’s claims that Oregon would lead the nation in ObamaCare implementation and expertise — and staked his reputation as a physician on it. Oddly, though, when the program collapsed, Kitzhaber told everyone, including KATU-TV, that he had not been told of any problems until they arose. When KATU tried to press Kitzhaber on that point, one of his aides brought a quick close to the interview.

That prompted more digging by KATU, which found numerous reports sent to Kitzhaber’s office predicting the collapse of the system long before its rollout. The discoveries make Kitzhaber look a lot less than honest or a lot less than competent, or both:

On the bright side, Democrats are bailing out of Congress like rats from a sinking ship; the latest being Henry "Nostrils" Waxman, the second most awful congressmn (after Jim Moran, who is also leaving).

Dem exodus from Washington has a common thread – ObamaCare

Perhaps it was just the retirement of Henry Waxman that made this clear, but the pattern has been evident for the last few years. Sam Baker connects the dots for National Journal, and points out the dangers for Democrats who have to defend this system for the short-, medium-, and long-term future:

Congressional Democrats began the Obama administration with a deep bench on health care issues—one whose passion and collective experience far outstripped their Republican adversaries. That dynamic has now almost entirely reversed.
Since their razor-thin Affordable Care Act victory, nearly all of the Democratic lawmakers most experienced and most passionate on health care have either left Congress or announced their plan to leave this year.
And that’s a problem for Democrats, given that their passage of Obamacare has handed them responsibility for health care for the next decade. Republicans, meanwhile, will take every opportunity to attack the law—and blame any and all of the health care system’s problems on it. …
Democratic leaders and committed liberals can and will still defend Obamacare politically, along with the basic idea of universal coverage. But there aren’t many Democrats left who—like Waxman and some of his departing Congressional colleagues—are truly invested in the ins and outs of the Affordable Care Act as well as other nitty-gritty health care issues.

It’s not just the House, either, and it’s not just this cycle. Senators Max Baucus and Tom Harkin both have decided to leave on their own, as did Chris Dodd, who took over the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee after Ted Kennedy died in 2009. Harkin chairs it now, while Baucus chaired the Finance Committee that manipulated the reconciliation process in order to get ObamaCare passed. Reps. Waxman and fellow Californian George Miller are taking a powder after this term, both key allies of Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare, while Allyson Schwartz is leaving for a shot at the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race.