Whole Lotta Obamacare Schadenfreude

I've been neglecting this for a few days, and articles are starting to pile up in digital warehouse:

For Some Uninsured, Simply Signing Up Is A Challenge

When the Affordable Care Act rolled out last year, Californians enrolled in both Covered California and expanded Medicaid in high numbers. But there are still millions in the state without health insurance. Undocumented people don't qualify for Obamacare benefits. And many others still find coverage too expensive — or face other obstacles in enrolling.

One of those people is Leaburn Alexander. At 6 a.m., he's finishing his shift as the night janitor at a hotel near the San Francisco International Airport. He clocks out just in time to catch the hotel's shuttle back to the airport, where he will catch a bus.

"Right now I'm on the beginning of my commute," he says. "After an eight-hour shift, my commute is like 2 1/2 hours."

Well yes, if you work all the time, and have a long commute, getting anything done is tough. But another aspect of why it's difficult to sign up is simply the complexity of the process. Because this is run through the IRS as a tax event but administrated at the state level, the rules are complicated, and vary from state to state, making it difficult for anyone, let alone the poor and unsophisticated. Morever, much of it is intended to go through clunky computer systems, which further disadvantages the poor, the old and the unsophisticated.

Healthcare.gov average premiums increasing in 2015

Obama officials say the average prices for healthcare coverage on Healthcare.gov will increase in 2015, the Associated Press reportedThursday.

The Department of Health and Human Services says customers purchasing the lowest cost "silver" plans, which are the most popular type of plans in the states using the federal exchanges, should see an average increase of five percent. The second-lowest cost "silver" plans, meanwhile, are expected to only increase in cost by two percent, on average.

The more popular the plans are, the more expensive insured they attract, and the prices have to rise to break even.  Thus, expect a race to the bottom, with benefits decreasing in value as time goes on.

Obamacare sticker shock fears: Feds plead with Americans to shop around

The administration is trying to preempt Obamacare sticker shock in 2015 by pleading with Americans to shop around in the marketplaces instead of automatically re-enrolling in the health plans they chose last year.

Officials said Thursday those who don’t look around and compare plans during open enrollment could see their costs rise because the so-called benchmark plans are more expensive this year.

 Like drugs, the first use is often at discount rate.

Chuck Todd on Obamacare: ‘This Bill Is a Mess’

“This bill is a mess. There’s a reason it’s in the front of the Supreme Court. It’s amazing how many people I have in here who were telling me stories, ‘we just assumed we could fix that in conference committee and we could do this here’ and all that stuff, so they allowed a lot of sloppy language and sloppy this and sloppy that to happen and they just let all these guys put whatever they wanted in it because they said we’ll clean it up in conference. Well, obviously that didn’t happen,” he added.

Todd said his biggest critique of the healthcare law is the Democrats essentially allowed the health insurance companies to write the legislation.

“I understand the political decision to do that but you’re never going to – and maybe the insurance companies will keep it from ever being repealed, right, because at the end of the day they’ve changed their entire business model but what have you got? What is it? At the end of the day, it’s the ‘Keep the Insurance Companies’ Industry Intact Act.’ They own it and obviously they want all these customers so I wonder if that’s something someday you’ll start hearing more and more Democrats second-guessing themselves on,” Todd said.

There is some truth there; Gruber and his colleagues in the Congress wrote the bill with the idea of preserving the health insurance companies until the whole system collapsed under it's own weight, at which point they can claim they tried "free market solutions" and they didn't work, and subsequently take over as a single payer. Add Todd to the voice on the left who wish they'd have skipped the "let the system fail" part, and move straight onto the direct governmental control part.

The real lesson from 'Grubergate'

Obamacare was designed so that no one could figure out that it was created as a tax — and a massive wealth transfer away from the middle class. Gruber even acknowledged, "If [the Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies."

No problem, said Gruber. They simply wrote the law "in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as a tax." Of course, the Obama administration went on to argue to the Supreme Court the mandate was indeed a tax all along. But by then it didn't matter — they'd already exploited the legislative process to pass Obamacare and hoodwink American voters.
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This is the most important lesson to be learned from Jonathan Gruber's honesty: The bigger and more complex the bill, the more vulnerable it is to political manipulation — and the more likely it is to deceive the American people. Obamacare epitomizes why Congress should tackle such sweeping reforms with a piecemeal, straightforward, and transparent approach. Hopefully the incoming Congress will remember this as they take up health care reforms of their own.

Sebelius: Americans don’t like Obamacare because their “financial literacy is low”

Well, she may claim to not know who Jonathan Gruber is, but she sure did get a copy of his talking points. Discussing Obamacare with a USA Today reporter, former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blamed many of the law’s problems on the fact that Americans lack her sophisticated understanding of insurance:

Still, Sebelius didn’t dispute the point that many Americans don’t fully understand how health insurance and the Affordable Care Act work, including the trade-offs involved in expanding coverage.

“A lot of Americans have no idea what insurance is about,” she said. “I think the financial literacy of a lot of people, particularly people who did not have insurance coverage or whose employers chose their coverage and kind of present it to them, is very low — and that has been a sort of stunning revelation. It’s not because people hid it from folks. It’s because this is a complicated product.”

Sebelius served as insurance commissioner for the state of Kansas before epically botching the roll-out of a federal entitlement program in historic and ostentatious fashion. So, she knows a thing or two, America.

They have about the same level of regard for the public as Rowdy Yates had for the cows.  Head 'em up!

And now, HHS denies Gruber for the third time as the cock gets ready to crow: HHS asks GOP: Keep us away from Gruber

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is asking lawmakers not to seat ObamaCare consultant Jonathan Gruber next to Medicare's top official when the two testify on Capitol Hill next week.

HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation Jim Esquea wrote to the House Oversight Committee with the request, stating that government witnesses are "almost always afforded an opportunity" to sit alone or with other federal officials.

“The accommodation of separate panels for government witnesses reflects important comity in congressional-executive relations,” Esquea wrote. “The relatively few exceptions to this practice reinforce the seriousness of this accommodation.”
The Oversight panel, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is preparing to grill Gruber over his comments that the "stupidity of the American voter" and a "lack of transparency" helped ObamaCare pass in 2010.

"The request is currently before Chairman Issa but at past hearings, government officials have testified alongside other non-administration witnesses," said Becca Watkins, a spokeswoman for the committee.

You paid him to advise you, and accepted his advice. Live with it.

Is Obamacare Destroying the Democratic Party? - One can only hope, but cockroaches are awfully hard to kill.

“Even though midterm elections favor Republicans, the 2014 results show middle- and working-class dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party rising to dangerous levels, which threatens the party’s growing demographic advantages.

Perhaps most notably, Republican House candidates in 2014 won 37 percent of the Hispanic vote, their highest percentage since Republicans rejected immigration reform in 2005, and a slight majority, 51-49, of Asian-American voters, who had been moving decisively in the Democrats’ favor. Asian-Americans and Hispanics are crucial to future Democratic presidential victories.”

“In combination with the growing Republican allegiance of whites, these trends raise the possibility that the Democratic plan for victory by demographics could implode, which would make the case for a full scale re-evaluation of its strategies and policies glaringly obvious.”

Obamacare benefited the bottom 20% of the country, and cost the remaining 80%. That doesn't strike me as a way to gain votes, especially when you consider the bottom 20%, even when the can vote, vote much less regularly than the others, and are already almost entirely in the democrats pockets.

Wounded Donkey: The Democratic Party's Obamacare Disaster

In 2009, Democrats made a tactical decision to sacrifice a large number of seats to pass a health-care bill. A few Jonathan Gruber gaffes later, they are starting to second-guess themselves.

Schumer helped build the Democratic congressional majorities of 2006 and 2008. Now those majorities are gone. Harkin is being succeeded in the Senate by a Republican, and a fairly conservative one at that.

Thus, it is fitting that they have both criticized Obamacare in the waning days of the Democratic Senate majority. Harkin in particular is saying it might have been worth it for single payer, but not for this.

 After midterm drubbing, senior Dems voicing regret over ObamaCare

For their part, Democrats -- including former Obama aides and a former top staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- didn't hesitate to push back against Schumer's comments.

Several noted that, as a member of leadership, he not only voted for the bill but was deeply involved in its route to passage.

"Certainly the senator's statement was intended to appeal to Senate Democrats who might be looking for a new leader in the next few years," wrote former Pelosi Chief of Staff John Lawrence, who challenged Schumer's suggestion that the Affordable Care Act only benefited a small percentage of the electorate in a blog post. "It just wasn't necessary, in order to prove he has their backs, to put a dagger into the backs of President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders."

In a tweet, former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett pondered: "So what exactly does Chuck Schumer believe was the error? Does he believe that the goal of winning office is winning office?"

Asked about the fact Republicans are using his comments against him at a Tuesday media availability, Schumer didn't walk them back but pointed out that his entire speech was some 20 pages long. That's "all I'm going to say on that issue," he said.

With executive action, Obama risks losing Chief Justice John Roberts

At issue is whether the administration must abide by one provision in the healthcare law, which says subsidies may be paid to those who enrolled in state health exchanges, or whether the president can extend those benefits to include people who signed up on the federally run exchange.
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Experts say that legally the healthcare case is a close call. If so, the outcome may turn on whether the justices are inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, or whether they believe it's time to rein him in.

Obama's bold decision to press ahead with his immigration order in the wake of the GOP victories in the midterm election will not escape the attention of the court's conservatives.

Shapiro said the new immigration plan will "confirm the chief justice's view" that the court should not allow the administration to revise laws passed by Congress.