Obamacare Schadenfreude Fireworks

See the complete weather report in the post below this one; I just hope the storm blows by in time for fireworks at the beach this evening.

The outrage of the the day is the confluence of two scandals, the Obamacare enrollment debacle and the Veterans affair wait list scandal. It seems that the administration took workers out of the VA application system and into Obamacare enrollment:

In another indicator of how low a priority veterans have with this administration, a whistleblower in Atlanta has revealed that VA employees were switched from processing VA applications to those of the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.

Scott Davis told the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“We don’t discuss veterans. We do not work for veterans. That is something that I learned after working there. Our customer is the VA central office, the White House and the Congress. The veterans are not our priority. So whatever the initiatives are or the big ticket items, that is what we focus on.”

He later appeared on the Neil Cavuto show and claimed that 17,000 applications for VA Healthcare were destroyed. He also said they’re “also looking into a backlog of over 600,000 pending applications for VA Healthcare.” Davis said the applications were purged as a way to deal with pressure from Washington D.C.

 As quipped by Ace:

Sometimes, in your Socialized Medicine Future, your health is going to be less important than servicing the current political needs of the Rulership Class.

You're just going to have to get used to this, peons.

By the way, the D.C. Circuit might nuke ObamaCare tomorrow (Which would have been yesterday, so I guess the ruling is still pending:

Remember the Halbig case? If not, catch up right now by re-reading this post from January, written after a D.C. district court judge ruled in Obama’s favor. O-Care is a famously complex law but the lawsuit that could end up demolishing it is surprisingly simple. In a nutshell, there’s a line buried deep in the statutory text that says federal subsidies for insurance premiums will be available to anyone who buys a plan on “an Exchange established by the State.” Question: Does Healthcare.gov, the exchange built by the federalgovernment after 34 states refused to build their own exchanges, qualify as an “Exchange established by the State”? Or do only state exchanges qualify? If it’s the latter, then millions upon millions of people who’ve signed up for O-Care through Healthcare.gov since October in the expectation that Uncle Sam will be paying part of their bill are in for a nasty surprise. The only fix that’s available (unless His Majesty tries some executive gambit, of course) is for Congress to amend the statute so that subsidies are available on the federal exchange too, but what are the odds of the House GOP agreeing to that? If the D.C. Circuit, which is set to rule any day now on the appeal of the earlier ruling, sides with the challengers against O, consumers will be forced to either come up with the money for their premiums themselves or drop their coverage. And if most of them choose to drop coverage, leading to a mass exodus of healthy people from various insurance risk pools, suddenly the White House is facing a death-spiral problem where hiking premiums on the remaining enrollees is the only way to pay for all the sick people still in the pool. That’ll lead to more dropped coverage, which means even higher premiums, and then it’s spiralmania.

It’s a magic bullet, aimed right at the heart of ObamaCare. What will the D.C. Circuit do?
. . .
It’s impossible for me to believe that the Supremes generally and John Roberts specifically, having eaten boatloads of crap from the right for upholding ObamaCare on the challenge to the individual mandate, are now going to pull a “never mind” and torch the whole thing because of a drafting ambiguity, but hope springs eternal for separation-of-powers aficionados like Turley. So much for the legal angle to all this. Here’s the political angle: What happens if the D.C. Circuit does nuke the subsidies eligibility for federal-exchange consumers? Would the House GOP even consider a bill reinstating those subsidies in exchange for other concessions of some kind? Before you say “hell no,” bear in mind that there’ll be a lot of voters out there PO’d that they’ve just lost their sugar from Uncle Sam and a lot of Democrats whispering to them that they could have that sugar back if only the damned Republicans didn’t want to see them suffer. Plenty of hay could be made before the midterms. Phil Klein, who has more faith in Boehner and crew than me, thinks there’s no way House Republicans would dare cave on subsidies, certainly not before SCOTUS has ruled on this at least. Hopefully he’s right — emphasis on “hopefully.” But maybe it’s all moot: If the GOP held out and refused to reinstate the subsidies, His Majesty would be tempted to issue some sort of dubious executive order (say, right around November 1st) proclaiming that the subsidies will be reinstated under HHS’s authority. That might be illegal, but even if it is, what’s anyone going to do to stop him? And even if there is a way to stop him by suing him over it, how will that stop him in time to prevent him from reaping the benefits at the polls on election day? Gulp.

Some paragraph breaks might have helped, even if they were only cosmetic. And speaking of hurricanes and death spirals:  Insurers seeking double-digit ObamaCare premium hikes in NY

Insurance firms participating in New York’s ObamaCare health exchange are seeking double-digit hikes for patient medical premiums in 2015, new figures reviewed by The Post reveal.

The average hike sought by insurers for individual plans is 12 percent—but a number of firms serving large numbers of patients want to boost individual premiums by nearly 20 percent.
. . .
The proposed rate increases call into question one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act — curbing runaway health-care costs.

Hey, New York. You voted for it. Enjoy in (we in Maryland deserve similar sympathy).

From the folks at Reason: Selling Obamacare: The weird, misleading propaganda behind the federal health care law

It might seem odd that Joanna Coles, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, was invited to the White House for lunch. After all, why would the most powerful person in the world bother meeting with the editor of a publication that specializes in hot summer sex tricks and the year's most dangerous diet? Particularly on May 2, 2014, when just about every important political journalist was in town for the White House Correspondents Dinner, the annual gala where pols and press rub shoulders and bond over bottomless booze.

It's a long one; but if you're into such things, read the whole thing. Government by propaganda. Goebbels would have loved it.

Revising (Or Correcting!) The Declaration Of Independence

The past is not dead. It is not even past, as earnest historians (presumably progressive) attempt to revise the Declaration of Independence. From the Times:

Every Fourth of July, some Americans sit down to read the Declaration of Independence, reacquainting themselves with the nation’s founding charter exactly as it was signed by the Second Continental Congress in 1776.
Or almost exactly? A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by theNational Archives and Records Administration contains a significant error — smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less.
The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., concerns a period that appears right after the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the transcript, but almost certainly not, she maintains, on the badly faded parchment original.
That errant spot of ink, she believes, makes a difference, contributing to what she calls a “routine but serious misunderstanding” of the document.
The period creates the impression that the list of self-evident truths ends with the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she says. But as intended by Thomas Jefferson, she argues, what comes next is just as important: the essential role of governments — “instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” — in securing those rights.
“The logic of the sentence moves from the value of individual rights to the importance of government as a tool for protecting those rights,” Ms. Allen said. “You lose that connection when the period gets added.”

The story reviews her very impressive detective work and concludes with her perspective:

“We are having a national conversation about the value of government, and it does get connected to our founding documents,” she said. “We should get right what’s in them.”

Oh, brother. Progressives are about to enter their Blue Period and righties are about a week away from being labelled 'period deniers'. . . 

Yeah, I know, not a word about Obamacare or schadenfreude, but read on:

IN OTHER NEWS: A timely surprise for libs was found in a recently discovered version of Lincoln's handwritten Gettysburg Address:

...testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure without national single payer health care.

Who knew?

Have a Happy 4th!