The 93 Million ObamaCare Lies

Posted By Matthew Vadum On November 1, 2013 @ 12:56 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments

The Obama administration has known for three years that when the employer mandate is enforced in 2015 up to 93 million Americans will be forced out of their employer-sponsored health insurance plans.

This means President Obama has not only been lying to Americans for at least three years, reassuring them that they would be able to keep their current healthcare plans, but that a massive chunk of the nation’s insured will be hurt by his signature healthcare reform that leftist Democrats unethically rammed through Congress in the dead of night.

The disturbing 2010 analysis of insurance market upheaval conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was revealed yesterday by Avik Roy of Forbes magazine.

As one commentator puts it, employers still have to decide by September 2014 if they will “pay the fine for non-coverage and force their employees into the individual exchanges, or absorb more of the skyrocketing premium costs we’re seeing this month.”

Employers “may opt for an in-between solution of private exchanges, but even that will force employees out of their current plans, contra[ry] to the Obama promise that Americans can ‘keep their plans.’”

Such decisions will have to be made ”just weeks before the midterm elections. Take the headlines and outrage we are seeing now for the impact that ObamaCare has on the individual market and perhaps as many as 12 million Americans, and then multiply it by six as employers make the rational decision to get out of the health-insurance business altogether. The delay of the employer mandate may end up being the worst decision made by Barack Obama except for the hyperpartisan pursuit of ObamaCare itself.”

All those who love America can only hope that an earth-shattering electoral backlash ensues that forever snuffs out the utopian nightmare of socialized medicine. We’ll see soon enough.

Meanwhile, Americans are learning just how far behind schedule the Obama administration is in signing up Obamacare enrollees.

It turns out that enrollment has barely gotten off the ground. At a morning meeting of a “war room” within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Oct. 2, attendees learned that only “six enrollments have occurred so far,” investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News reports.

By the afternoon of Oct. 2, enrollments had risen to “approximately 100.” By the end of the day there were “248 enrollments” nationwide, according to CMS war room documents handed over to the House Oversight Committee chaired by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

CMS is aiming for 7 million enrollees in the so-called exchanges by March 31, 2014, the end of the initial six-month enrollment period. (That’s 248 down so far and just 6,999,752 to go in order to meet the official quota. Forward!)

The exchanges are artificial, bureaucrat-created cartels that merely mimic free, competitive markets, perhaps well enough to dupe people with little understanding of real-life commerce. It’s not really shopping, of course, if you have a gun to your head.

The Obama administration claims that millions of Americans have swamped the Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, since it went live on Oct. 1 and that it registered an impressive 4.7 million unique visits in the first 24 hours despite barely functioning in that period. The administration refuses to provide documentation to back up the difficult-to-believe unique visits figure.

Quite understandably, sane people don’t believe anything the Obama administration says nowadays, especially when it comes to Obamacare.

Issa certainly doesn’t. Yesterday the lawmaker subpoenaed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for information about the bungled HealthCare.gov launch that she’s refused to hand over voluntarily. Issa wants a complete accounting from HHS about the laughably incompetent website launch, including how many people tried to enroll in an insurance plan using the HealthCare.gov website and how many actually succeeded.

Issa and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) have repeatedly demanded the information from Sebelius.

Congress shouldn’t have to use legal compulsion to get the Obama administration to provide “basic information” about the exchanges, Alexander said. “But apparently that’s what it’s going to take.”

The senator said he hoped the subpoena “will force open the administration’s black box of secrets that are keeping Congress and the entire American public in the dark.”

According to Attkisson, the war room notes “leave no doubt that some enrollment figures, which the administration has chosen to keep secret, are available.”

Notes from the Oct. 2 morning meeting say, “[s]tatistics coming in.” The contractor “QSSI has a daily dashboard created every night.”

The notes also indicate that: “Direct enrollment is not working for any issuers”; Experian credit reporting agency is “creating confusion with credit check information”; and “Issuer phone numbers are not appearing correctly on the Pay Now page.”

The dysfunctional rollout lends a great deal of weight to the theory that Obamacare was designed to fail in order to clear the way for what the Left really wants: a one-size-fits-all single payer scheme that feeds the insatiable leftist fetish of equality — equally bad healthcare for all.

Our red-diaper baby president and his comrades have long wanted a single-payer system that suffocates healthcare choice. Obama’s slightly less diplomatic colleague, socialist Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), has gone on record saying she wants to crush insurance companies.

Now she’s telling Republicans complaining about Obamacare to drop dead. “You know, I want to say to my colleagues after a three-and-a-half year campaign to repeal, to discredit, to even shut down the government over Obamacare, I want to say: get over it,” Schakowsky said at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

Is kicking most American workers out of their health insurance plans a way to bring about the ghoulish, America-killing, single-payer system that Obama and Schakowsky so badly want? It may very well be.

President Obama and Democratic lawmakers are already blaming insurance companies, instead of the true culprit, sinister anti-market government policies, for the recent nationwide tsunami of Obamacare-related insurance policy cancellations. This week Obama even said Obamacare “will actually help lower the deficit,” an absolute fiscal impossibility.

On Wednesday Obama badmouthed the nation’s insurance companies, which is part of the old Saul Alinsky playbook. Obama had the gall to justify his fascistic takeover of the American healthcare system in historic Faneuil Hall, Boston, of all places, a fact that ought to make more than a few Founding Fathers turn over in their graves. During that address to an audience of trained blue-state seals, barely a word of truth escaped the chief executive’s lips.

Obama demonized insurance companies that provide affordable health care insurance as “bad-apple insurers” that “had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received, or use minor preexisting conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy.” The caudillo from Chicago vilified insurers further by calling affordable plans that pre-date the misnamed, mandate-heavy Affordable Care Act “substandard plans.”

Remember, Obama is the same medical genius who claimed doctors delight in chopping off patients’ appendages for fun and profit. In 2009 Obama said doctors get a “pittance” for treating obesity but are “immediately” reimbursed $30,000 to $50,000 for amputating a diabetic’s foot. In fact, a surgeon is more likely to get around $1,000 from Medicare for such an operation and no medical professional takes amputating a patient’s body parts lightly. But truth matters little when you’ve got a healthcare sector to nationalize.

Americans are also learning that Obama’s White House thugs are threatening officials at trade associations and insurance providers to keep their mouths shut about the chaos the so-called Affordable Care Act is causing in the healthcare industry.

CNN investigative reporter Drew Griffin said the White House is trying to prevent executives from detailing how the Obamacare law is forcing widespread cancelation of plans.

“If an insurance executive is quoted, speaks out, says anything negative about the Obamacare rollout, they, or more likely their bosses, are to get a call from inside the White House asking them to explain the comments,” Griffin said. “It’s being perceived as pressure to keep quiet.”

Multiple “sources within the industry” have told Griffin that “there is a reluctance to speak out because of these phone calls.”

Insurance industry insider Robert Laszewski said the White House “is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet.”

Griffin said that other industry sources told him they “fear retribution from the White House.”

Incidentally, the American Glob blog reminds us that during a speech in Strongsville, Ohio, on the Ides of March in 2010, Obama irresponsibly hurled numbers at the crowd.

The president claimed that under Obamacare premiums would drop by an arithmetically impossible percentage. For Americans “who get their insurance through the workplace … a lot of those folks, your employer, it’s estimated, would see premiums fall by 3,000 percent, which means that they could give you a raise.”

Presumably President Obama, who has never been accused of understanding economics, meant to say something other than “3,000 percent.”

But in the same speech, he rattled off other percentages that ought to resonate today with Americans who are now suffering from insurance sticker-stock as a result of Obamacare.

In the 2010 speech, Obama said, “I’m here because of the folks seeing their premiums go up 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 percent in a year.”

“Ohio, I am here because that is not the America I believe in and that’s not the America that you believe in.”

But that is exactly the healthcare regime that Obama is foisting on Americans. As a result of the extravagant healthcare mandates in the Obamacare law, many Americans are lucky to see their premiums jump as little as 20 percent to 60 percent in a year. Many others are seeing their policies canceled outright, rendering them uninsured or forced into an Obamacare exchange.

In the speech, Obama wheeled his dead mother around as a prop, lying about her final half year of life. He said she died of cancer, “and in the last six months of her life, she was on the phone in her hospital room arguing with insurance companies instead of focusing on getting well and spending time with her family.”

The story has been thoroughly debunked but Obama loves telling it. In reality the insurance company that covered Obama’s mother, Anne Dunham, reimbursed most of her medical expenses without making a fuss.

In a few short years there may be no private health insurers remaining and Americans may look back fondly on the days when they could talk to representatives of the insurance companies covering them.

If Obama gets his way, we’ll all be begging bureaucrats for medical treatment and death panels to spare our lives.

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