Obamacare Schadenfreude - Leafing Out

I spent most of yesterday in the garden trying to beat back the last of fall's leaves, and preparing the various flower beds for mulching.  Yesterday was a nearly perfect spring day; temperatures approached but never broke 80 F, the humidity stayed down, and the breeze was enough to keep one perfectly cool.  I'm feeling it this morning, though.

The leaves are just beginning to come out on some of the tree's.  You could see it yesterday, but I swear there is twice as much as yesterday.  Now, for the Obamacare Schadenfreude:

First, this little bit of ultra-schadenfruede as, much like the back end of theObamacare website, out-going HHS Secretary Sebelius discovers that something important has been left of of her resignation statement, the second page...



Sebelius' resignation continued to reverberate yesterday.  Stacy McCain: Scapegoated for ObamaCare Failures, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Resigns

Thursday’s resignation of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the biggest move yet in President Obama’s effort to rescue his signature government health-insurance plan, and to limit the political impact of the program’s failure.

The administration and its allies are trying to convince Americans that problems with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are just temporary technical glitches with a website — the “botched rollout” narrative — rather than fundamental flaws with the law itself.

Sebelius’s resignation fits that narrative, permitting Democrats and their media sympathizers to claim that problems with ObamaCare were caused by the former HHS secretary’s incompetence, and not by any basic problem in the president’s program. This is likely to become a key issue in the campaign for the fall mid-term elections, in which Republicans seeking to capture the Senate majority will argue that ObamaCare is a complete failure that should be repealed, while Democrats will say the policy is successful, but simply had a few early glitches that have now been fixed.
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Having made one woman (Sebelius) a scapegoat for ObamaCare’s failures to date, now the White House disingenuously shoves another top female administration official into the political meat-grinder, hoping to obtain a short-term political benefit from Burwell’s public humiliation in Senate hearings. Considering how Hillary Clinton was scapegoated for the Benghazi massacre, Republicans might well ask, “Why does Obama always blame women for his failures?”

I believe that Sec. Sebelius departure was long planned as a way to allow the administration some level of deniability for the ongoing problems of Obamacare.  Way to take one for the team, Kathleen.

Even the left could not agree on how to spin the resignation. Lefties wonder: Should we spin this Sebelius resignation as good news or bad news for ObamaCare?

On one side, Team “Mission Accomplished”:

On the other side, Rachel Maddow, who’s also keen to declare “Mission Accomplished” but doesn’t understand why the coach would be fired halfway through the victory parade. She also doesn’t see why, if Sebelius had been planning to quit for the past month (as the NYT claimed yesterday), she told HuffPo just last week that she’d be sticking around until November. Hmmmm.

Some Bloomberg columnist claim to know for sure: Obama Banks on Sebelius Leaving to Take Heat Off Party

The departure of Kathleen Sebelius from PresidentBarack Obama’s cabinet removes a focal point for criticism over Obamacare’s troubled rollout, right at a moment when the White House can blunt attacks with enrollment numbers that exceeded targets.

Senate confirmation hearings on the president’s choice to succeed Sebelius as Health and Human Services secretary, budget director Sylvia Mathews Burwell, will give Republicans days of media exposure for their criticism of a program that remains unpopular.

Those hearings will now be held months ahead of midterm congressional elections, helping diminish the impact on voters.

Sebelius’s departure also addresses demands from some Democrats for a change at the department to demonstrate that Obama recognizes the difficulties, political and practical, caused by the flawed startup of the health-care law. . .

Think it's hard navigating the Obamacare process to get health insurance? Try getting out...

I never wanted to be a pawn in President Obama’s absurd and irresponsible attempt to mandate, regulate and complicate the American health care system. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of a choice.

I was a casualty of Mr. Obama’s Big Lie. You know the one: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” By the time my plan vanished, the only individual health insurance plans available had been captured by the tentacles of Obamacare.

Signing up for insurance under Obamacare was harder than making sense of Donald Trump’s hair. It took more than 20 attempts over four days just to get on the “Health Insurance Marketplace” website and shop for insurance. The plan I found most similar to my canceled plan cost nearly $1,000 more a year, and my deductible increased from about $2,000 to more than $5,000. So I was forced to pay almost twice as much for a whole lot less insurance.
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Signing up for Obamacare was a tremendous hassle. But even that experience was a joy compared with what I went through to cancel my coverage.

On the same day that I was counted as one of the 7.1 million Americans that Mr. Obama energetically exploited during his Obamacare victory lap, I was able to enroll in a group insurance plan through my employer. I was free from the shackles of my terrible Obamacare plan — or so I thought.

When I tried to terminate my plan, my insurance company told me that plans purchased through the marketplace could only be canceled through the marketplace. That started a brutal three-day fiasco.

After trying multiple times to sign on to Healthcare.gov to terminate my plan, only to find the site was down or I wasn’t allowed to log in, I gave up on the website and opted for the personal approach, the telephone. I was put on hold for 15 minutes and forced to listen to an insufferable synthesizer-Peruvian pan flute duet that the United Nations would likely consider an act of torture by the United States against its own citizens.

. . . and much more time on the phone ensues . . .

After nearly five hours on the phone waiting to speak with someone, I’m convinced that an Obamacare specialist is like Bigfoot or Norm’s wife on “Cheers.” I’ve heard the tale, but there’s no proof they actually exist.

Ultimately, on my umpteenth try, three days into the process, I was finally able to get into the Healthcare.gov site, wade through several pages and cancel my plan — although, unlike with most insurance plans, I couldn’t get a prorated refund on the days I had paid for but wouldn’t need. One last $100 slap in the face.

Apparently, the people who compared buying insurance from the government to dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles (or whatever they're called in your state or country) were optimists.

No. Next Question: Can The ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers Be Believed?

More discussion of the Rand Study which estimate something more like 4 million signups compared to the 7.5 million claimed by Sebelius in her broken farewell address.

As I've said in a professional capacity, all measurements are wrong, the only question is how by much, and in what direction.  I would guess that the administrations enrollment numbers are high by some substantial amount, and they know it, and hope to slip the real data out slowly in dribs and drabs to avoid more intense scrutiny.

HHS still has no idea how many ObamaCare enrollees were previously uninsured



Celebrity Chef Mario Batali, an Obamacare supporter admits that Obamacare will add unknown costs to his business.

Final word goes to Smitty at The Other McCain. This Is Not The Time To Go Wobbly On #ObamaCare: Abort It With The Prejudice Of All Stone-Hearted Feminists Combined

In this one-time, symbolic sense, I’m willing to be seen encouraging an abortion. And, yes, a plan for something better, that supports liberty, the economy, mom and apple pie needs to be described.

And then, Just. Bludgeon. ObamaCare. Like. A. Baby. Seal.

In ways they’ve never discussed before, senior administration officials now admit they feared late last fall that the entire law might collapse under the weight of Democratic defections and aggressive Republican calls for repeal. The mathematics of veto-proof majorities always argued against repeal, but the nightmare of HealthCare.gov followed by the “political lie of the year” on individual insurance policies filled senior Obama advisers with Affordable Care Act existential dread.

Make a fundraiser out of it. Print a full copy of the legislation and amendments, drill a center hole, drop in some rebar, and then sell $5 ticket to take a whack at a monument do diabolical falsehood.

ObamaCare is a river of lies, with headwaters in Hell. Let its legend as the antithesis of our Constitution grow and instruct future generations that Progress was a fool’s errand.