Free Republic

".......The very purpose of insurance reform is to create a broad market in which the less healthy will be able to get coverage at affordable prices. This made a certain amount of cost-shifting inevitable, a truth captured succinctly by the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, one of the nation’s premier health policy writers:“You can’t fix health insurance without changing health insurance.”...............A detailed comparison of two Pew surveys — one conducted in December that found Obama with a 55 percent approval rating(with 39 percent disapproving)and the more recent survey with the 12-point approval deficit — shows that, while he has lost support...

The Obama administration was accused Wednesday of providing cribbed answers to 23 questions in the form the Senate received for the hearing of its nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security -- as the nominee also ran into criticism from one senator who said he won't vote for him unless he makes a major border security pledge. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., got into a heated exchange with nominee Jeh Johnson, pressing him to commit to boost border security to 90 percent effectiveness. Johnson did not make the pledge. McCain said he, then, could not support his nomination. That was...

As NewsBusters has been reporting, CBS News has been one of the press outlets totally willing to expose the disaster that is the ObamaCare rollout. On Monday, Sharyl Attkisson did a fabulous report on the CBS Evening News revealing that “four days before the launch the government took an unusual step: it granted itself a waiver to launch the website with a level of uncertainty deemed as a high security risk” (video follows with transcript and commentary)...

Bob: "Did you hear about the Obama administration scandal...? Jim: "You mean the Mexican gun running?" Bob: "No, the other one." Jim: "You mean SEAL Team 6?" Bob: "No, the other one." Jim: "You mean the State Dept. lying about Benghazi ?" Bob: "No, the other one." Jim: "You mean voter fraud?" Bob: "No, the other one." Jim: "You mean the military not getting their votes counted?" Bob: "No, the other one." Jim: "You mean that 3 or 4 of Obama's GAY friends were mysteriously MURDERED when they came forward with claims he was gay too?" Bob: "No, the other...

President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least 29 times. The videos show Obama promising 300 million Americans that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” But that’s not what he really said, Obama announced Monday in a speech to about 200 Organizing for Action supporters, gathered at the St. Regis hotel in D.C. “What we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” he told Obamacare’s political beneficiaries and contractors....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is Sunday's This Week with Stephanopoulos and the roundtable discussion. Stephanopoulos says, "This is kind of pile-on time now for the president. I want to show some magazine covers this week as well. You see the New Yorker cover right there. The president is trying to, with a huge cell phone, trying to get HealthCare.gov working. Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, 'Can Obama Reboot?' And Forbes -- this may be the most interesting one -- Vladimir Putin comes up on top of Obama as the most powerful leader in the world. What do we make of this," Jonathan Karl?...

Today, Team Obama isn’t getting any support from its normally active cheering section at CNN. Bob Laszewski, an executive who provides consulting services to many major American insurance companies, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet.” Here’s what’s Bob is talking about: Insurers who expose Obamacare’s most sinister effects are told they can’t become authorized Obamacare insurance providers – that means they’d be denied access to the largest market in the country just for telling the truth about how many people are being forced off their...

(excerpt) All Obama cares about is that every day the general direction of the country is toward where he wants to go. The day-to-day minutia and the problems and the apparent failures of what he's trying to do, irrelevant. Because the chaos and the dismantling is the success. And when you're gonna start dismantling something as big as the health care system, of course it's gonna be a mess. These guys don't know what they're doing. They don't really have an alternative and they don't care right now. All they care about is that it gets so bad that there...

Scandal: In recent days, President Obama has claimed ignorance about spying on allies and the ObamaCare meltdown. How can it be this president is always the last to know whenever anything goes wrong in his administration? Even though the NSA tapped the phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel some time ago, President Obama claims he didn't know anything about it until after an internal review he ordered earlier this year. Why should he? After all, "the president doesn't sign off on this stuff," one official said. If Obama's ignorance of this seems dubious, consider that a German weekly reports that...

(snip) So what did Obama hope to achieve with his 2,700-page poison pill of ObamaCare? Simple. Cast your mind back to that golden age one month ago, before you were forced to spend countless precious hours of your mortal life, trying to log onto a $500-million dysfunctional website. Twas then that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius summoned the media to proclaim the coming glories of ObamaCare. And, lo, the miracle of "health-care" reform arose through the shimmering mists, as she revealed its national hotline number: 1-800-F**K-YO. And that, dear readers, is the point of the whole shebang. 16...

Our technocracy is detached it is from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance. These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster. The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or...

Software expert Dan Weber, in a comment on Marginal Revolution, offers an exceptionally cogent technical explanation of the failure of the Obamacare launch: The real problems are with the back end of the software. When you try to get a quote for health insurance, the system has to connect to computers at the IRS, the VA, Medicaid/CHIP, various state agencies, Treasury, and HHS. They also have to connect to all the health plan carriers to get pre-subsidy pricing. All of these queries receive data that is then fed into the online calculator to give you a price. If any of...

60 Minutes had an absolutely devastating report on the Obama administration’s failure to protect Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans in Benghazi. I’ll post the video when available (update – available and added), but the heart of the report is that there were clear and unequivocal warnings which were ignored, and the Obama administration lied about these warnings after the attack. Hillary and Obama blamed a video and stood by the caskets perpetuating that lie. And remember how almost all of the media obsessed with Mitt Romney’s statement over Benghazi, and colluded to ask Romney gotcha questions while downplaying and...

On September 9, 2009, Joe Wilson, Congressman from South Carolina, shouted "You lie!" when President Obama was touting the benefits of his Affordable Care Act, now dubbed "Obamacare." Many in America were shocked that anyone would call the President of the United States a liar in such a forum as a presidential address to a joint session of Congress. But, now, as we look back on 5 years of Barack Obama, we see that Obama and his Administration do lie. And they lie a lot. * Both Eric Holder and Barack Obama stated that "Fast and Furious was a program...

President Barack Obama knew of the organization’s spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel – and approved of the efforts, a National Security Agency official has reportedly told a German newspaper. The Economic Times writes the “high-ranking” NSA official spoke to Bild am Sonntag on the condition of anonymity, saying the president, “not only did not stop the operation, but he also ordered it to continue.” The Economic Times also reports the official told Bild am Sonntag that Obama did not trust Merkel, wanted to know everything about her, and thus ordered the NSA to prepare a dossier on the politician....

KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: In an ideal world there would have been a lot more testing. We did not have the luxury of that with a law that said it's go time on October 1st and frankly a political atmosphere where the majority party at least in the House was determined to stop this any way they possibly could including shutting down the United States government. So it was not an ideal atmosphere.

Last weekend the diplomatic world was agog at the refusal of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to accept a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Global disbelief gave way fast to clear understanding: The Saudis have decided that the United States is no longer a reliable partner in Middle Eastern affairs. The Saudi king, who supported Syria's anti-Assad rebels early, before Islamic jihadists polluted the coalition, watched Mr. Obama's red line over Assad's use of chemical weapons disappear into an about-face deal with Vladimir Putin. The next time King Abdullah looked up, Mr. Obama was hanging the Saudis out to dry...

The easiest way to crush a Liberal in an argument about Obama is to ask, “What would you say if Bush had done it?” In the case of ObamaCare, the lesson might be the most poignant. I found these questions on a discussion board, and decided this time, it was worth the comparison: if ObamaCare were BushCare what would the repercussions and responses be? So ask yourself these questions, and then question if ObamaCare would be deader than disco. Imagine… 1. If Republican George Bush made it mandatory that every American buy health insurance. 2. If Bush said if you...

Obama's anti-press measures 'are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration' [James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, and former washington Post Executive Director, Leonard Downie, Jr. both rip the Obama administration big time]

In its first report on press freedom in the United States, the Committee to Protect Journalists warns Obama has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for both reporters and their government sources. Among the case it details: six government employees - plus two contractors, including Edward Snowden - have faced felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act for leaking classified information to the press, compared with three such prosecutions in ALL previous U.S. administrations. ...