Free Republic

The obligatory follow-up to Ed’s post earlier. When they said O was planning to enroll today, I thought they meant he’d take a break from the links for half an hour to punch in his info on the D.C. exchange website. Upon reflection, though, that was silly. Of course the president’s not going to entrust his vital info to one of these tinpot online exchanges. He knows better than anyone how vulnerable they are; the one he built himself was so grotesquely flawed, his own security team wouldn’t sign off on it. Special procedures would be needed. I think it’s...

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve looked at the various polls on Barack Obama’s performance and noted the dramatic decline in approval on both policy areas and personal qualities. Today, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake and Sean Sullivan take a look at the former, and inform readers that Obama is in much bigger trouble than just dropping below 40% overall approval: Recent polling from the Pew Research Center and Quinnipiac University has shown Obama’s approval rating on almost all major issues plunging into the 30s — below even his lowest-ever overall approval rating, which has stood around 40 percent...

On Thursday night, MSNBC host Chris Matthews will sit down with President Barack Obama for an interview which will, in part, focus on the problematic roll-out of the Affordable Care Act. Matthews said that he intends to grill the president on this failure and contended that this incident was akin to “a brilliant writer” who, despite a “great theme,” turns in an essay full of technical flaws. “I’ll be talking about executive accountability and the strange way of this roll out, as it has occurred,” Matthews told MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell. “I think I would compare it, Andrea, to a

The new and improved Obamacare website struggled under heavy traffic loads on Monday, but still appeared to operate pretty much as the Obama administration has promised: Okay, but not perfect. After a weekend of final, intensive fixes, officials unveiled a somewhat repaired HealthCare.gov on Sunday and promised that it will work well enough to serve the Americans who want insurance exchange coverage by New Year’s.

House Democrats are blocking their Republican colleagues from using Obamacare in letters mailed on the taxpayer's dime to voters, but who made up the term in the first place? Lots of people are asking this question, getting answers like "Certainly a republican, potentially Glenn Beck" and "I am about 80% sure it was Rush Limbaugh" and "Hillary Clinton's campaign coined Obamacare." Iowa Rep. Steve King claimed President Obama himself made it up. Free Republic posters want to claim credit. Lots of liberals suspect an insidious plot by Fox News. But the answer appears to be: a lobbyist.

The Obama administration claimed victory Sunday for making HealthCare.gov workable for the vast majority of users, a standard that will be tested as millions of people flood the site in the next three weeks. Sunday marked the passage of the administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing the broken ObamaCare enrollment website, which serves consumers in 36 states. The agency that oversees HealthCare.gov said "we believe we have met the goal" of making the system navigable for most people, but cautioned that more fixes lie ahead. "Dramatic progress has been made," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stated in a...

The Obama administration promised the healthcare.gov website would be fixed by today. The Obamacare reboot began with 11-hour website shutdown. That’s not all… Unfortunately there are still bugs and glitches. CNN reported this morning the website crashes during the signup process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59VTIDjKDZ4

In an ongoing trend, unrelated to Obamacare, companies have been passing on more and more healthcare costs to employees. However, an ACA gotcha has impacted the way costs are passed on, with families taking a bigger hit than individuals at many companies. Please consider Companies Prepare to Pass More Health Costs to Workers. Many employers are betting that the Affordable Care Act's requirement that all Americans have health insurance starting in 2014 will bring more people into their plans who have previously opted out. That, along with other rising expenses, is prompting companies to raise workers' premium contributions, steer them...

Democratic leaders in counties across the state say they don’t think problems with the health care law will hurt their party or Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan’s re-election efforts next year – even as they work on a post-holiday game plan to change the conversation. **SNIP** Local Democrats haven’t done a lot to get their message out yet, but Campbell said it will be along these lines: “Why wouldn’t we want health care for everyone? Isn’t that a good thing? Yes, it’s complicated and yes it’s having problems launching. We hate that, and I’m ever hopeful it will start working better...

Sebelius adds Christmas levity to frustrating ObamaCare shopping experience? Published November 30, 2013 FoxNews.com Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, embattled over glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov, is suggesting some standard holiday shopping tips for Americans trying to buy insurance on the website. In an apparent attempt at holiday levity amid coal-tinged criticism, Sebelius suggests Americans “avoid the lines” by shopping on the site during off-peak hours, after weeks of the ObamaCare site crashing because of too many visitors at once. “As the holiday shopping season heads into high gear, we have some consumer friendly shopping tips for individuals looking for quality...

https://www.healthcare.gov/

HealthCare.gov, the problem-plagued federal online site for signing up for insurance under Obamacare, will go down for extended maintenance on Friday night and overnight ahead of Saturday's deadline to have it working for most people, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said. The overnight maintenance overnight is set to last from 9 p.m. ET Friday until 8 a.m. ET Saturday. It's not the first time the website has gone done; the administration has frequently done regular weekend maintenance, usually on Sunday mornings from 1 a.m ET to 5 a.m. ET. During the maintenance checks, the website's application and enrollment...

Obama Admin: Please Don't Use Obamacare Website This Weekend by Ben Shapiro 27 Nov 2013, 9:20 AM PDT On Wednesday, the Obama administration leaked to The New York Times that it would be stifling the outreach efforts for Obamacare prior to this weekend, fearful that a “crush of new users” could sink Healthcare.gov entirely. According to “administration officials,” the Times reported, the White House had killed “a big health care marketing campaign planned for December out of concern that it might drive too many people to the still-fragile Healthcare.gov.” This is a major shift of message from an administration whose...

Nancy Pelosi’s proud of Obamacare. Debbie Wasserman Schultz thinks it’s wonderful. Democratic strategists are scared. **SNIP** “We’re trying to deny what everyone knows is happening,” a Democratic polling veteran told Politico. “Anybody who is halfway intelligent knows this is a big … problem for us. It’s impossible not to see. We can try to hide our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not a problem, but it is.” If the past is prologue, that pollster’s right. In the 2010 mid-terms, the last time Americans went to the polls without President Obama on the ballot, Democrats were washed out of...

Nearly four in 10 seniors worry ObamaCare will cause them to lose doctors they like, despite President Obama's repeated promise to the contrary, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll. That translates into nearly 16 million people age 65 and over. Their concerns appear to be justified. Many seniors are, in fact, already losing access to their doc tors, and more than half a million are losing access to plans they liked this year, as $200 billion in ObamaCare-mandated cuts to the popular Medicare Advantage program start to take effect. Earlier this month, seniors learned that UnitedHealth (UNH) is dropping thousands...

Here's my suggestion for the new GOP slogan: "Mr. President, if you like your Obamacare you can keep your Obamacare."

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall. “Understand this is not a redistribution argument,” the president told his audience then. “This is not about taking from rich people to give to poor people. This is...

On Thursday, Fox News’ Ed Henry tweeted that MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell, as well as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post and Fox News’ Juan Williams, had been invited for a private off-the-record chat with President Obama. Obama’s signature program, Obamacare, has been flailing in the press for weeks, and Obama apparently believes that it is about time to reshift the narrative:

... The Democrats' sappy pleas that they understand they have to win back consumers by "fixing" what's wrong with Obamacare are bogus. Consumers don't have a choice. Americans won't be using the Obamacare exchanges because they find the Obamacare branding and marketing pitches informative and appealing, they will use the exchanges because if they don't, Obama’s IRS will fine them. The gentle appeals that we will be hearing as a result of all the “rebranding” and “remarketing” are just cynical, doe-eyed scams. The truth is, if you don’t sign up for Obamacare, the IRS is coming after you. Now that’s...

If there’s one thing Obamacare’s supporters and opponents can agree on, it’s that Obamacare is unprecedented. Never before did the federal government require every American to buy a commercial product. Never before did it attempt to use its spending powers to coerce states into implementing a federal program. And never before did it so fundamentally rewrite the rules of such a major economic industry – one that makes up about a seventh of the national economy. With Obamacare, the federal government decided it would run, not just a business, but an entire industry of businesses. Imagine if the government decided...