Posted on 11/02/2013 6:22:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
It's as though two completely separate conversations have been going on. From day one, the health policy community has correctly seen the Affordable Care Act as an attempt to completely change the health care system. This isn't even controversial. It's accepted by all as an undisputed fact.
However, no one has ever said this to the American people. In fact, the message of the Obama presidency — going all the way back to the 2008 campaign — was just the opposite. In that election, Barack Obama rejected Hillary Clinton's call for an individual mandate (a proposal that would obviously affect everyone) in favor of his own proposal which appeared to mainly help those who couldn't afford insurance. And how many people would that be? You could be forgiven if you thought it was about 10% of the population.
Then, on the eve of the passage of the ACA, virtually every Democrat who appeared on TV to defend it had one and only one message to offer: people were being discriminated because of pre-existing conditions. And how many of those people are there? Well for the first three years under the law, anyone denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition was able to enter the new (ObamaCare) risk pools and pay the same premium a healthy person would pay. How many did that? About 107,000. That's out of a U.S. population of approximately 314 million!
To allay concerns about ObamaCare's individual mandate, the president repeatedly promised that "if you like your health insurance plan you can keep your health insurance plan" and "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor." Over and over again the message was the same: most people will be completely unaffected by the new health law.
Then over the past week or so, the general public woke up to some stunning revelations. It now appears that as many as 10 million people will lose their individual health insurance policies as of January 1. To put this number in perspective, the administration's goal for next year is to sign up 7 million people. We could actually end 2014 with more people uninsured than there were at the end of 2013.
On top of that, The Washington Post has just awarded the president Four Pinocchios for his statements. Although it took them five years to do so, when they finally got around to it the write up was devastating. "Four Pinocchios" is a nice way of saying that the president has been lying all along. [Or, is it possible the president didn't know? More on that below.]
So why has it taken so long for the mainstream media and the general public to wake up to what is going on. I think there are three reasons: (a) insurance industry executives (who knew what was going on) were threatened and bullied into silence by the Obama administration, (b) the health policy community (who also knew what was going on) abandoned their role as critical analysts and assumed the role of cheerleaders for the new law instead and (c) the health care media (who should have known what was going on) didn't do its job.
Before going forward, let's put to rest a claim now being made by President Obama and Valerie Jarrett: that the insurance cancellations are the fault of the insurance companies, not the administration. It was the administration (through its own regulations) that made it virtually impossible for most individually owned insurance to be grandfathered. As The Washington Post explains:
The law did allow "grandfathered" plans — for people who had obtained their insurance before the law was signed on March 23, 2010 — to escape this requirement and some other aspects of the law. But the regulations written by HHS while implementing the law set some tough guidelines, so that if an insurance company makes changes to a plan's benefits or how much members pay through premiums, co-pays or deductibles, then a person's plan likely loses that status.
If you dig into the regulations (go to page 34560), you will see that HHS wrote them extremely tight. One provision says that if co-payment increases by more than $5, plus medical cost of inflation, then the plan can no longer be grandfathered. (With last year's inflation rate of 4 percent, that means the co-pay could not increase by more than $5.20.) Another provision says the co-insurance rate could not be increased at all above the level it was on March 23, 2010.
Even before these regulation were promulgated, no serious policy analyst ever thought that more than a handful of plans would be grandfathered for very long — not the Congressional Budget Office, not the health committees on Capitol Hill, not the specialists in the private sector, not anyone. But with Obama's repeated assurances that no one had anything to worry about, with a compliant health care media and with a cheerleading health policy community, the general public has remained completely in the dark — until now.
As for premiums, every analyst knows that if you force insurers to charge everyone the same premium (ignoring differences in health care status), premiums will go up for the vast majority of policy holders so that they can go down for the most expensive enrollees. As Megan McArdle explains:
It's absolutely true that every policy wonk who was writing or speaking about the law in 2009 and 2010 understood that it would mean premiums going up for at least some people, many of whom would lose insurance that they would have preferred to keep…They had to; mathematically, it was not possible for coverage to expand and everyone's premiums to go down — not unless you spent more in premium subsidies than the government could afford.
Everyone knew this — except ordinary folks. They received the opposite message. Going all the way back to the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama told everyone their premiums would actually go down! See this Q&A from the 2008 Obama campaign (Another HT: to Megan).
As for the president himself, he is a complete enigma to me. I've never felt that I understood him. He appears to have looked directly into the TV camera and said something that was blatantly untrue (in the words of Joe Scarborough) "over and over and over and over again." You have to go all the way back to Richard Nixon to find something comparable.
Or is it possible the president really didn't know? He often appears very detached and he spends a lot of time on the golf course — even when critical issues are pending.
I report. You decide.
Actually zero is the following:
One of the chief characteristics of the malignant narcissist: He is interested only in himself, his desires, his thought, his wishes... his ideas, his past, his plans; the world is real only as far as it s the object of his schemes and desires; other people matter only as far as they serve him or can be used; he always knows everything better than anyone else.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/the_malignant_narcissist_and_the_benghazi_snuff_film.html
He is a serial liar!!!!!
0 has committed more treasonous and impeachable acts than all of the other presidents before him yet no one dare files articles of impeachment for fear of being demonized by people that wanted to be judged by their character not their skin yet his skin color is the only reason he remains. MLK would be offended and angered at his own people for allowing a tyrantt to enslave people because they are too proud to admit he is a horrible president if he were alive today.
You beat me to it.
Sure, but I maintain he did know and didn't give a rat's patootie.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 allows the government to seize and control the communication media.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 designates the registration of all persons. Postmaster General to operate a national registration
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to
develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.
And you though you were protected by the Bill of Rights? Well, yes, if Congress ever chose to review and nullify any of these orders -but they don’t so they stand as the law of the land.
If one has to ask then one is part of the problem.
Yes, Adolph Obama lied!
Were his lips moving?
To true Marxist believers..."the end justifies the means"...
So whatever helps to achieve your goals is not a lie, just simply a means to an end...
You can never get them to admit to a lie since in their mind they aren't lying...
This. Put yourself in the mind of the enemy, otherwise you will go stir crazy trying to fit a trained liar's words and deeds into your own sense of ethic and morality.
I love Dem response of “but Bush lied about WMDs and led us into Iraq.” They forget that those “lies” were the same ones that the Clintons, Kerry, and Kennedy stated a few years earlier, and the Iraq invasion had full Democrat support. Fast forward seven years to Republican cans being shut out of Obamacare hearings, being passed with no Republican support, and the arrogance of Obama saying “Republicans can come along for the ride, but they’re gonna have to sit in the back of the bus.” Republicans need to hammer the “if you like your coverage you can keep your coverage” line endlessly, and stay far away from any requests for bipartisan problem solving. The Dems would love to get them involved so that their servants in the media can blame Republicans, but this devastating lie should be hung on Obama like a scarlet letter.
It would be news if he told the truth. That would shock the whole world.
I believe an artificial racist is always preferable to a real live traitor.
However, I believe obama lies about virtually every single thing - every issue he talks about, everything. I believe this is for three inter-related reasons.
First, he seems to be a pathological liar. I can remember hearing or reading his lies and thinking "he doesn't have to lie about that, why is he?" The obvious answer is he likes it, he is psychologically compelled to lie even when there is no good reason to lie.
Second, he is an un-American, anti-American radical at heart. His whole upbringing and youth shaped him that way. To believe he could be anything else is fantasy. He hates America - well, what America was and what we stood for. Now, he and his cohorts in crime have transformed America into something else. Not what he wants it to be, not yet, but certainly not what we were. If he told us what he is really thinking, planning, and wants he would never have gotten where he is today. What he wants to do is unconstitutional, illegal, and stupid. But that won't stop him, he'll keep lying about it. Saying one thing, doing another quite the opposite.
Finally, he lies as a sign of contempt. When he lies, his lies are so blatant, so transparent they are insulting. You can tell by his mannerisms, speech patterns, and the flimsiness of his lies that he thinks the American public is beneath him, worthy only of his contempt and scorn. We aren't worth telling the truth. We are so ignorant and so easily manipulated that he doesn't have to put any effort into making up believable lies. At least when Clinton was lying to us he was smoother and far more believable.
obama, liar-in-chief.
What an asinine question? All of a sudden some idiots are coming to the realization that the imposter in chief is lying. The imposter has been living a lie his whole adult life. Right thinking folks have known this all along and warned the illiterate voters to no avail. This guy is by far the worst and most corrupt potus in American history.
All liberals lie
They can't help it.
Lying comes natural to them
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