Free Republic

**SNIP** The expanded hardship exemption, for instance, "opened a major can of worms," wrote analyst James Capretta on the Weekly Standard blog. "The administration said for months that the mandate would not be waived for anyone, even those with canceled policies, and it vowed a veto of any delay legislation coming out of Congress. Now the rules have been changed, and some families who have committed to pay thousands of dollars in insurance premiums will feel very personally betrayed by an untrustworthy administration." They join millions of others who are reeling from massive premium increases under this onerous law. Over...

At times it seems like the sheer magnitude of bad news about ObamaCare can redound to its own benefit. It’s easy for individual pieces of bad news to get lost in the sea of failure that has characterized the Obama administration’s signature “achievement.” That might be the case with the most important story to appear about ObamaCare this week, from Tuesday’s edition of the New York Times. The paper reported that the Obama administration has ruled that the federal health-care program be exempted from the category of laws considered “federal health care programs.” Now, this is obviously dishonest: the federal...

Suppose BHO Insurance Co. decides it wants to corner its state's market in automobile coverage. It begins an aggressive ad campaign offering a too-good-to-be-true deal: Sign up with us, and we'll give you better coverage at lower premiums. We're so sure you'll love our deal that if you like the terms of your existing policy, you'll be able to keep them--GUARANTEED! The ad campaign, with the company's charismatic president acting as pitchman, is a smashing success. The competing companies lose so much business that they declare bankruptcy or are acquired by BHO. But BHO's policies are more expensive, and they...

Obamacare: Day 35America Held HostageRoundup of News & ViewsNo. 5.  Nov 4, 2013   At Least 3.5 Million Policies Canceled Article at Breitbart   Obamacare enrollment by paper and phone held up by failed websitePhone and paper options pushed by Obama no better than website Article at NY Post Article at Washington Times   Obamacare User Sent Other People's 'Eligibility Letters'Article at Weekly Standard   Regularly scheduled call with press canceled due to crashed siteUnscheduled Outage “a natural part of the process” Article at The Hill Article at Politico   Canadian officials fired IT firm behind troubled Obamacare websiteArticle at Washington...

<p>A web video is offering clear and embarrassing proof that, contrary to President Obama’s latest claims, he promised people repeatedly that they could keep their health-insurance plan if they liked it.</p> <p>In the president’s latest attempt to walk back his pledge, Mr. Obama told supporters Monday night in Washington that his oft-stated promise about people keeping their insurance included an important caveat about health plans being grandfathered under the law.</p>

full title....CBS News: White House Granted Itself Waiver To Launch Obamacare Website ‘Deemed As High Security Risk’A memo the Obama administration turned over to the House Oversight Committee revealed that the White House granted itself a waiver to launch the faulty HealthCare.gov website with “a level of uncertainty.” The waiver was granted four days before the Oct. 1 launch of the Obamacare website, even though it was “deemed as a high (security) risk,” according to CBS News. CBS News reports tests to secure customer information privacy on the federal health exchange website fell behind schedule, with a required top-to-bottom security...

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers. My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2 percent after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31. My choice is to get coverage through the...

Yesterday, President Barack Obama claimed that when he promised Americans that they if they liked their health care plan they could keep it, he also stated "if it hasn't changed since the law passed." The stunning video below amounts to a Groucho Marx "Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?" moment. The fact that video exists of at least 23 instances in which the president added no such limitation clause, and in some of which he added the emphatic "Period" after claiming you can keep your health plan seems to not register with him. See,...

As the month of October has rolled on and stories regarding the train wreck that is Obamacare mount, one has to wonder when the President’s media allies will come to the rescue and skew reality on health care reporting. The answer may be … now. The Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) is once again teaming up with a private U.S. foundation known as the Commonwealth Fund. The Fund, a self-described ‘progressive’ organization, is currently led by David Blumenthal, former senior health adviser to the Obama campaign. The group makes little to no secret of their support for...

The systemwide defects in Obamacare mounted Monday, from compounding enrollment problems to soaring insurance cancellations to breaches of privacy, as the Obama administration struggled to contain the political damage and repair its laughingstock health care website. The number of people receiving cancellation notices from their insurers rose to more than 3.5 million, in spite of President Obama’s debunked pledge that Americans could keep their plans if they liked them. Mr. Obama’s subsequent reassurances that people who lose coverage can “just shop around” is increasingly a dead end for consumers who can’t access the government’s malfunctioning website or can’t get their...

Rep. Trey Gowdy says President Barack Obama’s latest comments about his health care law could earn him another Nobel Prize — for fiction. “The president already has a Nobel Prize for peace, I think he’s shooting for one in fiction,” Gowdy (R-S.C) said Monday on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.” ...

Rep. Trey Gowdy says President Barack Obama’s latest comments about his health care law could earn him another Nobel Prize — for fiction. “The president already has a Nobel Prize for peace, I think he’s shooting for one in fiction,” Gowdy (R-S.C) said Monday on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.” Gowdy hit the president on changing his language on whether people would be able to keep their insurance plans under Obamacare, after host Megyn Kelly made reference to remarks Obama made Monday regarding existing coverage.

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)

"The fact of the matter is, the president went out and said, I think he said what he believed to be the fact and what was substantially was the fact, because 90, whatever, 95, 96, 97 percent of Americans are in the position where they can keep the insurance they have and they're going to see no changes," Axelrod explained to MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Monday night. Axelrod dismissed people currently losing their health plans as a "small group" of people who bought "substandard policies" in the individual market.

So the program debuts and it’s a resounding, famous, fantastical flop. The first weeks of the news coverage are about how the websites don’t work, can you believe we paid for this, do you believe they had more than three years and produced this public joke of a program, this embarrassment? But now it’s much more serious. No one’s thinking about the websites. They wish you were thinking about the websites! I bet America hopes the websites never work so they never have to enroll. They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true....

<p>How Americans see President Obama changed in an important way this week. It’s because there is a huge difference between lies and bulls – - t.</p> <p>Obama says a lot of things that are not true, even nonsensical. But it’s easy to shrug off most of these, because they aren’t really lies. They’re just bulls – - t.</p>

At the same time as dozens of Obamacare enrollees were being signed up, millions of other Americans were having their health insurance canceled — including so many pundits of left (Kirsten Powers), right (Michelle Malkin), and center (David Frum) that the Pulitzers should introduce a prize for Best Suddenly Uninsured Writing. Among their number was Matthew Fleischer, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times: Most young, middle-class Americans I know are happy that millions of previously uninsured people will receive free or heavily subsidized insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We just didn’t realize that, unless we had health insurance...

In my search for the truth about how much ObamaCare will increase how many Americans’ health insurance premiums I came upon a frightening map of the United States(see below) that projected what the percentage hikes would be state by state. The projections, prepared by the Society of Actuaries in March, 2013 predicted some pretty outrageous premium increases in the likes of California,62%, Alabama, 60%, Texas, 34% and Arizona 41%. Only in New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey would the premiums decline slightly. Maybe the computer models used by the Society of Actuaries are just plumb ridiculous and wrong. I printed...

ObamaCARE didn’t terminate your health plan; OBAMA did! It’s right there in black-and-white on page 43 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The president’s famous promise that if you like your plan you can keep your plan (without which the bill most certainly would never have passed) is indeed the law of the land. It is Section 1251, to be exact. This is what it says . . . . SEE LINK Ironclad. Bulletproof. If you like your plan, “nothing in this Act” can “require that an individual terminate coverage.” It’s. The. Law. So why are millions of...

Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.