Ron Fournier, please pick up the white courtesy phone, the IRS is calling...
Posted on 02/11/2014 7:23:09 AM PST by upchuck
It's getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act. The latest blow to Democratic candidates, liberal activists, and naïve columnists like me came Monday from the White House, which announced yet another delay in the Obamacare implementation.
For the second time in a year, certain businesses were given more time before being forced to offer health insurance to most of their full-time workers. Employers with 50 to 99 workers were given until 2016 to comply, two years longer than required by law. During a yearlong grace period, larger companies will be required to insure fewer employees than spelled out in the law.
Not coincidentally, the delays punt implementation beyond congressional elections in November, which raises the first problem with defending Obamacare: The White House has politicized its signature policy.
The win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture in which a partisan-line vote was deemed sufficient for passing transcendent legislation. It spurred advisers to develop a dishonest talking point—"If you like your health plan, you'll be able to keep your health plan." And political expediency led Obama to repeat the line, over and over and over again, when he knew, or should have known, it was false.
Defending the ACA became painfully harder when online insurance markets were launched from a multibillion-dollar website that didn't work, when autopsies on the administration's actions revealed an epidemic of incompetence that began in the Oval Office and ended with no accountability.
Then officials started fudging numbers and massaging facts to promote implementation, nothing illegal or even extraordinary for this era of spin. But they did more damage to the credibility of ACA advocates.
Finally, there are the ACA rule changes—27 major adjustments, according to Fox News, without congressional approval. J. Mark Iwry, deputy assistant Treasury secretary for health policy, said the administration has broad "authority to grant transition relief" under a section of the Internal Revenue Code that directs the Treasury secretary to "prescribe all needful rules and regulations for the enforcement" of tax obligations, according to The New York Times.
Yes, Obamacare is a tax.
Advocates for a strong executive branch, including me, have given the White House a pass on its rule-making authority, because implementing such a complicated law requires flexibility. But the law may be getting stretched to the point of breaking. Think of the ACA as a game of Jenga: Adjust one piece and the rest are affected; adjust too many and it falls.
If not illegal, the changes are fueling suspicion among Obama-loathing conservatives, and confusion among the rest of us. Even the law's most fervent supporters are frustrated.
Ron Pollack, executive director of the consumer lobby Families USA and an ally of the White House, told The Washington Post he was "very surprised" by the latest delays. For workers at large companies that don't provide coverage, he said, "It's very unfortunate … that they don't have a guarantee it will be extended to them for quite some time."
Put me in the frustrated category. I want the ACA to work because I want health insurance provided to the millions without it, for both the moral and economic benefits. I want the ACA to work because, as Charles Lane wrote for The Washington Post, the link between work and insurance needs to be broken. I want the ACA to work because the GOP has not offered a serious alternative that can pass Congress.
Unfortunately, the president and his team are making their good intentions almost indefensible.
AMEN!!! But nobamacare isn't the way to do it, obviously.
Comments at site: very cruel to poor Ronnie...
GOP should end healthcare insurance at work.
(Fix the tax code.) This old WW2 wage and price control idea is outdated and stupid.
And repeal the mandates so the market and consumers prevail.
..something RUSH has been saying for years....wonder if this author realizes it....*smiles*
Don't claim naivete, it's old fashioned stupidity. If you are 'naive' then you shouldn't be in the business........................
Why? Both the employees and employers are happy with it. If it were not for work provided insurance, most people would not be able to afford health insurance.
Advocates for a strong executive branch, including me,
= Statist douchebag...
And puts them squarely in the beginning of the Presidential primary season in 2016................
The reporter is admitting to being in the tank for Obama and Obamacare. The rats are jumping ship.
The cure must NOT be worse than the disease.
We need to go back to what we had and modify it - not go forward to some idiot liberal idea that’s worse.
It is less naivete and stupidity than simple dishonesty. You literally can not have a job like that without being willing to obediently repeat any lie you are ordered to repeat.
These people are stupid in many ways. But they are careerists. And the only way to advance their careers and keep their jobs is to repeat the stories they are told to repeat.
The problem is they realized after they have lied too many times their credibility is destroyed, no one listens to them and they become useless. That is what the author is talking about. Repeated lying has destroyed his credibility and his career and he is tired of it. His usefulness is finished and he fears he will soon be without a job.
He dearly wants the government to be his daddy, because at some fundamental level he instinctively understands that Ron Fournier himself is not competent to act as a normal adult. That's probably why he can't understand that there are real adults in this world, some of them in the GOP. But he can't get past his anti-conservative bigotry and can't hide his knee-jerk, reflexive Democrat/Commie partisanship.
Ron Fournier, please pick up the white courtesy phone, the IRS is calling...
The true reason for the author being frustrated is that he can not lie about the ACA anymore. He cannot effectively urinate on the LoFo's (low information voters) legs and tell them it is a spring shower, anymore, without being called out.
Is getting sick defending Obamacare covered by Obamacare?
The reason for the high cost of healthcare is the connection...and then government’s intrusion...get back to free market and prices would drop.
Naive? Stupid would be a better description.
From Wikipedia:
Ron Fournier (born 1963) is an American national political journalist currently of the National Journal. Fournier had previously served as Washington bureau chief at the Associated Press (AP) until leaving in In June 2010.
...In May 2008, Fournier was named the acting Washington bureau chief, replacing his “mentor” Sandy Johnson. Since taking over the position, Fournier has led a dramatic shift in the AP’s policy, moving it away from the neutral and objective tone it had become known for and toward a more opinionated style that would make judgments when conflicting opinions were presented in a story.[4]
Why? Both the employees and employers are happy with it.
I'm with you, Blood of Tyrants... Why should the link between "work" and "things you can buy with money you earn working" be broken?
Regards,
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