Post Midterm Obamacare Schadenfreude

No, the election didn't stop it. It just keeps rolling:

Just an indication of where that fraction of the public that bothers to vote in the midterm is: 100% of Newly Elected GOP Senators Campaigned on Repealing Obamacare

Every new GOP senator who won in last night’s election campaigned on repealing Obamacare.

Senators Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), David Perdue (R-Ga.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) all ran on a platform of repealing Obamacare.

If only for the sake of their credibility on this subject, the next Congress should prepare a replacement package for Obamacare along Republican principles, explain it to the public and pass it, and force the President to veto it. And then, failing that, they should use the power of the purse to defund Obamacare.

IRS Commissioner Predicts Miserable 2015 Tax Filing Season: Obamacare to blame for much of it:

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen warned that close to half the people trying to reach the IRS by phone might not get through during the upcoming 2015 tax filing season. “Phone service could plummet to 53%,” he told an audience of tax practitioners at the AICPA National Tax Conference in Washington, D.C. today. That would be down from an already unacceptable 72% during the 2014 filing season. The average hold time projection: 34 minutes! What’s to blame? Budget woes. “All we can do is try to maximize our services as well as we can; as well as we can is still going to be miserable. You really do get what you pay for,” he said.

Of course, the first refuge of the bureaucrat is to blame the lack of funding for piss poor performance. They always need more funding so they can make Star Trek themed training videos to teach the IRS agents how to answer the phones, or wintertime conventions in warm climates to learn how not to search email databases for potentially incriminating messages.

 In the meantime, Congress keeps passing laws that the IRS has to implement, namely the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) and the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (“FATCA”). For example, Koskinen said the IRS requested $430 million in 2014 from Congress to implement the ACA but got zero, forcing it to take money out of enforcement and taxpayer services budgets.

This will be the first filing season with two major provisions from the Affordable Care Act –the premium tax credit and the individual shared responsibility payment–on Form 1040. National Taxpayer Advocate Olson said she’s very concerned about the IRS receiving accurate information from the health exchanges. It won’t be the IRS’s fault, but taxpayers will likely put the blame on the IRS. Koskinen touted the web pages that the IRS has created to help explain the ACA tax provisions.

One get's the feeling that Koskinen enjoys sticking it to the public which has not supported his agency wholeheartedly.

Another good reason to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a system which is less tax intensive.

And coming soon, now that the tsunami has passed and a few democrats are still swimming around in the debris, more bad news about Obamacare prices: Obama Forces Insurance Industry to Withhold 2015 Prices Until After Election

For the first time in modern history, the Obama administration has forced insurance companies to withhold 2015 prices until after the election.

So he can shield Democrats.

In the past, new prices were announced 60 days before the first day of the year.

Not this year.

Warner Todd Huston reported:

Barack Obama is again playing political games with our health insurance industry and has turned in another underhanded move against it by forcing insurance carriers, brokers and agents to withhold their 2015 prices until after the 2014 midterm elections are over all so that the news of higher prices won’t hurt Democrats on Election Day.
This means that customers looking to get new insurance or those wishing to scout new policies to see if they can get a better deal are not able to shop for insurance.
Before we get into that, though, millions of new cancellations will be hitting on January 1, 2015. Much of this news has gone under the radar as Democrats and their lapdog media are keeping this as quiet as possible.
There is also something different with these cancellations, something that has never happened before in the healthcare insurance industry. Past practice has always been that the next year’s new rates are released 60 days before the first day of the next year. But Obama has mandated that companies hold back on that normal practice so that he can shield Democrats at the polls.

It might have saved Mark Warner.