sick??? i hope you get so sick that you start puking up sh!t from past lifetimes...
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.
Looks like Ron still wants to believe in Santa Claus after all. In fact, the principal beneficiaries of 0bamacare are the well-funded bureaucracy it creates. It's of the government, by the government, and for the government. Pills For The Poor was always a scam and it simply hasn't happened yet, and if it ever does it will be an afterthought.
In point of fact, Ron is discovering that his ability to feel good is costing the rest of us a great deal of money and a great deal of political freedom. He's still for it, though, so long as it continues to make him feel nobler than the people he's defrauding.
Work = money = stuff I wanna buy.
...and I want Unicorns to poop skittles.....and what moral and economic benefits?????????????
Mr. Fournier, there is nothing moral about taking people's money at gunpoint because you "want health insurance provided to the millions." No matter how "charitable" you may think you are with other people's money, your real purpose is self-aggrandizement. Worse, there is no constitutional power for your Federal agents to do your paid hit for you. It is therefore taking money at gunpoint illegally. It is theft.
So much for "moral benefits."
Notice Fournie did not say the GOP has "...not offered a serious alternative that can work..."
Yeah, what a DB. The guy decries the “win at all costs” mentality that led to Obamacare, then criticizes the GOP for not being able to effectively overcome/fight it.
You forget that the cost of medical care is very tightly linked with what the government will pay for a particular procedure, not supply and demand or market forces.
Idiot. This 2010 turd started with 30 million and ends with 30 million "uninsured".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/07/obamacare-leaves-millions-uninsured-heres-who-they-are/
Ron you are a blithering idiot from the land of unicorns.
Well of course....ever since government got involved....that was my point. I’m old enough to remember when there was no government in healthcare...and doctors made house calls....and we were lower middle class...
Who is this guy’s doctor, anyway? What if doctors said to these people who have ruined medicine for all of us—get lost!! Hit the road, M’sieu Fournier!
He says this disparagingly as though the heavy handed tactic is something to be looked down on yet Fournier still backed ACA.
These people make NO sense.
If a tax credit is provided instead, millions can shop for their own insurance and prices will come way down.
Employer provided insurance is keeping prices sky high.
I zeroed in in that too. It seens to me a de facto admission that the GOP has offered serious proposals.
Hey, Obamacare proved that with a slim majority and a lot of bribery, anything can pass Congress--no matter what.
The collusion between the DNC and MSM on daily talking points needs to be broken.
sick??? i hope you get so sick that you start puking up sh!t from past lifetimes...
What a disingenuous bastard! Blame Harry Reid and the Democrats' Borg-minded intransigence, not Republicans for that!
HF
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