Obamacare Schadenfreude - Man on the Run

Gotta get going today, but fortunately the list of Obamacare Schadenfreude for the day is minimal:



It's official, Obama has attempted to extend the pain of Obamacare for individual policies that were dropped because of Obamacare by dropping the requirement that their insurance be up to Obamacare "standards" ("free" birth control, e.g).

Obama Postpones Forced Dropping of Insurance Policies Until October 2016

And if you think he's not going to figure out that, hey, October 2016 is just before an important election and then delay it until May 2017, then let Rob Halford disabuse you of that mistaken belief.

Now, not only is Obama saying that these legacy plans can remain, but he’s saying they can stay alive for three years longer than intended. If they can be extended for three years, the new rules may never fully go into effect (unless Obama will allow a wave of cancellations in October 2016, just before the presidential election). And maintaining these plans will furtherdrive up the cost of insurance on the exchanges.

Remember, Obama deliberately canceled these policies in order to force them to subsidize sicker people in the exchanges. To the extent these people aren't in the exchanges, the cost for insurance on the exchanges goes up -- or, of course, Obama pays off the insurance companies through the "risk corridor" mechanism to induce insurers to set their prices artificially low. Allah concludes:

Quite simply, Obama was forced to choose between doing something that would help his party at the ballot box but hurt his signature health-care law and doing something that would help stabilize the law financially at the risk of generating a nasty backlash to his party from consumers with cancellations. He made the political choice. Which is exactly what O’s critics feared would happen as government insinuated itself further into the health-care industry via O-Care. Decisions on health-care policy are now a species of politics. You’re welcome, America.

MSNBC anchor displays her lack of understanding how a free economy works: ‘Is It Even Legal’ For Restaurant to Add ObamaCare Surcharge?

On Saturday’s Weekends with Alex Witt, Ms. Witt was incensed that Gator’s Dockside, a Florida restaurant chain, has started charging its customers a one percent surcharge to help cover expected ObamaCare-related costs. Witt fumed, “[I]s it even legal to just add on a surcharge like that? I mean, it’s essentially a tax.” [See video below the break.]
First of all, yes, Alex, it is legal. Second, if it were a tax, it would be the wimpiest tax ever. People can just avoid it by simply not eating at Gator’s Dockside. There is no law to force people to pay the “tax” – unlike ObamaCare’s individual mandate, which forces Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty (which the Supreme Court cynically justified as a “tax”).

Oh, yeah, that's another video showing how Alex feels about lying presidents.

One of the "6 million liars" fights back:

Harry Reid and other Democrats attacked Mrs. Boonstra, calling her a liar. The Democratic Senate candidate who was the target of the AFP ad, Gary Peters, had his lawyers send letters to Michigan televisions stations, threatening to have the FCC pull their licenses to broadcast if they aired the ad. Of course, neither Peters nor Reid is familiar with the details of the coverage that Mrs. Boonstra enjoyed under her old policy, or under her new, Obamacare-compliant policy. They based their claim that she is a liar on general characteristics of Obamacare.

But why this hysterical reaction from the Democrats? Mrs. Boonstra’s central complaint is that she was lied to–President Obama said that if she liked her coverage, she could keep it. She liked her coverage, and she lost it. That was the Lie of the Year, and neither Harry Reid nor Gary Peters is trying to resurrect Obama’s falsehood. On the contrary, by again extending the deadline for implementation of Obamacare with regard to individual and small group policies, the Obama administration is admitting that there are not just thousands, but millions of Julie Boonstras out there–people who are happy with their insurance, but are going to lose it because of the Democrats’ arrogance and deceit.