Free Republic

President Obama continues to alter his signature promise in selling the Affordable Care Act back in 2009 and 2010. "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan," he said back then. But that simple pledge has had to change as the Affordable Care Act has been implemented and a small percentage of Americans, albeit millions of people, have received cancellation notices from their insurance companies. And for the second time in two weeks, he's tweaked the line. When President Obama spoke Monday night to a group of supporters, he said: "While virtually every insurer is offering new, better...

The uneasy alliance between President Obama and health insurers is being put to the test by the troubled rollout of ObamaCare. With the botched enrollment website dragging Obama’s approval rating to record lows and threatening to undermine his biggest legislative achievement, some Democrats say the president should deflect blame onto the industry. The healthcare companies in many ways represent an ideal political target, as they are unpopular and intimately involved in the rollout — and Democrats haven’t hesitated to go after them in the past. Democrats highlighted what they said were the heartless business practices of insurers during the debate...

MARACAY, Venezuela (AP) -- Evelina Gonzalez was supposed to undergo cancer surgery in July following chemotherapy but wound up shuttling from hospital to hospital in search of an available operating table. On the crest of her left breast, a mocha-colored tumor doubled in size and now bulges through her white spandex tank top. Gonzalez is on a list of 31 breast cancer patients waiting to have tumors removed at one of Venezuela's biggest medical facilities, Maracay's Central Hospital. But like legions of the sick across the country, she's been neglected by a health care system doctors say is collapsing after...

There is a vital reason for all Americans to take a close look at how, specifically, the various government-run, single-payer healthcare systems around the world have already affected the lives of the people living under them. This is vital because Barack Obama and the Democrats actually have their sights set on creating precisely such a system here in the United States. For them, Obamacare is, and always has been, nothing more than a stepping stone toward their ultimate goal of a single-payer leviathan administered entirely by the federal government. Indeed, they’ve been quite clear about their intentions: • In early...

Obamacare's federal website is a mess, creating massive obstacles to enrollment in the law's health insurance exchange plans. Those taking President Obama's advice to apply by phone or by mail will fare little better, as their information must still be fed through the same glitchy computer system that is holding up everyone else. The website isn't the only problem, as things are only slightly better in the states that run their own websites. In Kentucky, less than 20 percent of the newly insured (or 4,832) have actually purchased plans – the rest will enter the taxpayer-funded Medicaid program. In Maryland,...

Taxpayers will have a choice: settle for single-payer or bail out private insurance, which otherwise won’t survive the ravages of Obamacare. Think back to the fall of 2008. Congress was asked to pass a $700 billion taxpayer bailout for Wall Street. We were told it had to be passed, or else the economy would collapse, perhaps into another Great Depression. House conservatives voted it down. The stock market fell hundreds of points in response. In the ensuing panic, Congress went along and passed the bailout. That bailout, and the insane, nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” bill passed just a few months...

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.” (snip)

Like so many things that seem new, ObamaCare is in many ways old wine in new bottles. For example, when confronted with the fact that millions of Americans stand to lose their existing medical insurance, as a result of ObamaCare, defenders of ObamaCare say that this is true only when those people have "substandard" insurance. Who decides what is "substandard"? What is older than the idea that some exalted elite know what is good for us better than we know ourselves? Obama uses the rhetoric of going "forward," but he is in fact going backward to an age when despots...

Rush insists the “problems” with Obamacare are, if not exactly planned, welcomed by Barack Obama as a way to collapse our entire medical health insurance system. His reasoning holds that Obama believes the details surrounding this disaster are unimportant as long as they lead to Americans getting on their knees to beg him to “fix” his problem. The theory holds that when we crawl to our King, tears in our eyes, frightened half out of our minds, we won’t care what he does so long as it “makes the pain go away.” In the general state of malaise we live...

Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel, a former adviser to the Obama White House, admitted today that, if Democrats have their way, the individual insurance market is going away. “Insurance companies don’t want, insurance companies don’t want the individual market as it’s constructed. They see the future. That individual market is going away. They don’t want to invest in it.” That was their plan all along. Via FOX News Sunday:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services--the federal agency that created and is operating the Obamacare exchanges--says in a budget document provided to the congressional appropriations committees that the Medicare, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will cover almost 116,000,000 Americans in 2014. That equals approximately 37 percent of the nation’s total population and approximately 43 percent of the population that will have some kind of health insurance. Of the approximately 57 percent of Americans who will remain in non-government run health insurance plans next year, many will qualify for a federal tax subsidy...

"Medicare for all" isn't perfect, but it does what the ACA can't: Guarantee better healthcare and a simpler system Whenever scandal arises in Washington, D.C., the fight between the two parties typically ends up being a competition to identify a concise message in the chaos — or, as scientists might say, a signal in all the noise. This week confirms that truism, as glitches plagued the new Obamacare website and as insurance companies canceled policies for many customers on the individual market. Amid the subsequent noise of congressional debate and cable TV outrage, Republicans argued that the signal is about...

The problem with health care in the United States is that it does not cost enough. First, some relevant points of comparison. There are many ways to do government-supported health care, but, if you took the popular American political debate as your sole source of perspective, you’d think that there were only three: the British National Health Service, the Canadian single-payer system, and the wildly dysfunctional dog’s breakfast we have just created and nicknamed Obamacare. But there are other models that are useful to examine, not necessarily because we want to replicate them in the United States but because they...

President Barack Obama made it no secret he was a proponent of a single payer health care system in America when he first came on to the national scene. However, he explained to his supporters over the years that a "potential transition" would be necessary to break away from the current system. Interestingly, as the implementation of the Obamacare exchanges face problems and millions begin to lose coverage from their private insurers, something President Obama promised would not happen, Democrats and their liberal allies are now beginning to suggest a single payer system as a solution to the rickety exchanges....

....."The Left is champing at the bit to go single payer, even before Obama Care has begun. The employer mandate has been delayed and thousands of exemptions have been granted. Of the major provisions, only the individual mandate and fines remain, and even they may be delayed. But the liberals say: Let’s change the venue and the rules before the game even starts."....

HealthCare.gov may be limping along to full viability, but Medicaid is flying off the shelves. New Medicaid enrollment is far outpacing new insurance customers under Obamacare so far, a subtle sign that the program could play a greater role in the law’s coverage expansion than first anticipated. Some people are signing up for the Medicaid expansion created by the president’s health law. Others were already eligible for their state’s current Medicaid program, but until this outreach campaign about health coverage, they had never signed up.

Okay, so now even now the DUmmies have realized that ObamaCare has completely bombed. So what is their solution? Even more big government in the form of single payer aka socialized medicine. Yeah, the government overpays for 10 year old website software to the tune of over $600 million that doesn't even work and now the DUmmies want to entrust our entire medical system to the feds. DUmb idea but that is why they they are called DUmmies. You can see the DUmmies abandon ship on ObamaCare only to reach for the equally ridiculous "single payer" in this THREAD,...

Not a single Republican voted for the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act, but one liberal Democrat is nevertheless blaming Republicans for the system that’s debuted to so much criticism. “While Republicans plot new ways to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, it’s easy to forget that for years they’ve been arguing that any comprehensive health insurance system be designed exactly like the one that officially began October 1st, glitches and all,” said Robert Reich, who served as President Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary. Reich says Democrats should have insisted on a single-payer system because it would have been “cheaper, simpler, and more popular.”...

People struggling with the problematic online access to the federal health insurance marketplace have alternative ways to sign up, a field organizer for a national group told churchgoers on Sunday. Several dozen members of Second United Presbyterian Church in Wilkinsburg listened as Gabby Jones-Casey talked about getting help from health centers and toll-free calls during a weekend of outreach by 150 organizers in 10 states, leaders said. Jones-Casey is one of three in Pittsburgh for a campaign called Get Covered America, which encourages the uninsured to sign up. Despite problems with the Web portal HealthCare.gov, there are alternatives that work,...

I was reminded of this interview when I saw this tweet by Daniel Horowitz: Now that the results of enrollment are coming in, it is quite clear that obamacare is medicaid 10:52 PM - 26 Oct 2013 Betsy McCaughey would agree, as she was on with Megyn Kelly last night to discuss the fact that Obamacare was designed to push people into Medicaid. Why? Because is a single payer system and that’s what they believe in, McCaughey said.