Free Republic

The Governor pulls no punches in her latest piece: President Obama flew in to Boston today to deliver another “ShamWow”-style infomercial for Obamacare, and it went about as well as his entourage’s snarled traffic debacle in Beantown. As millions of Americans are being kicked off their desired insurance plans and seeing their premiums skyrocket, the President had a lot of ‘splaining to do today. For starters we anticipated a Presidential apology for lying to Americans repeatedly when he promised things like, “If you like your current health care plan, you can keep it.” Make no mistake, he knew he was...

HELENA – In Montana, as many as 20,000 holders of individual health insurance are getting or will get letters from insurers saying their current policy doesn’t comply with "Obamacare" regulations, and is being “discontinued.“ But insurers say the letter is not a cancellation, and that they’re instructing those policyholders how to get comparable coverage, which may or may not cost more. Blue Cross sent notices to about 13,500 individual policyholders in Montana this fall, telling them their current policies are being discontinued because of the ACA. PacificSource, which has more than 5,000 Montana customers with individual policies, is sending letters...

The attention of the peripatetic political world has lurched suddenly from the dysfunctional rollout of the Obamacare website to the discovery — or, more accurately, rediscovery — that its functioning will roil the individual-health-care market. President Obama repeatedly promised that people would not lose their existing coverage as a result of his health-care plan. This lay somewhere between an oversimplification and a falsehood, as millions of Americans are facing exactly that prospect right now as the individual-insurance market complies with the law’s new regulations. Reports in Politico, the Los Angeles Times, and NBC News have added a tinge of revelatory...

On the one year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy Gov. Chris Christie slamemd Obama “The real problem is that people weren’t told the truth" “The White House needs to square that with what was told to the American people and told to the Congress beforehand, It doesn’t seem to square at the moment.”

This was on the White House web site at 5:30 EST today, October 29, 2013. Look at the second to last paragraph. You can click to enlarge.  In case you can't read it, here is just that paragraph full size I am as cynical as one possibly can be about politics and this even amazes me.

Democrats knew all along that some patients would lose their health insurance plans under the new law, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) acknowledged on Tuesday. Although President Obama had vowed repeatedly that, under his signature healthcare initiative, those who like their plans could keep them, millions of patients are reportedly in individual plans that don't meet the law's minimum coverage criteria, forcing them to buy better insurance. Hoyer, the House minority whip, said Democrats were aware that such a shift was coming. He defended the change by arguing that those patients would ultimately benefit by getting better insurance, many of them...

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday denied President Obama had misled the public when he said that consumers could keep their health insurance plans after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Carney said that consumers who "had a plan the day before the Affordable Care Act passed and signed into law" and who had not either dropped their coverage or "been thrown off the plan" by their insurance companies were "grandfathered in and can keep that plan." "If you've kept it, you can keep it forever, as long as your insurer offers it," Carney said.

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday denied President Obama had misled the public when he said that consumers could keep their health insurance plans after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Carney said that consumers who "had a plan the day before the Affordable Care Act passed and signed into law" and who had not either dropped their coverage or "been thrown off the plan" by their insurance companies were "grandfathered in and can keep that plan." "If you've kept it, you can keep it forever, as long as your insurer offers it," Carney said. The controversy...

Let's start with the very basics here. About 15 million people purchase health insurance policies on the individual market. That's about 5 percent of the population. Some -- or maybe even most -- of the plans offered on the individual insurance market right now don't meet certain requirements in the health-care law. They may not offer preventive care without co-payment, for example, or leave out coverage of maternity care, one of the health-care law's 10 essential benefits. How many people are going to get cancellation notices? It's hard to put an exact number on this, given that insurance plans are...

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer conceded to reporters today that Democrats knew people would not be able to keep their current health care plans under Obamacare and expressed qualified contrition for President Obama’s repeated vows to the contrary. “We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage,” Hoyer said in response to a question from National Review.

Barack Obama’s Senior Advisor, Valerie Jarrett, tweeted on Monday, “FACT: Nothing in #ObamaCare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.”

A set of health care service categories that must be covered by certain plans, starting in 2014. The Affordable Care Act ensures health plans offered in the individual and small group markets, both inside and outside of the Health Insurance Marketplace, offer a comprehensive package of items and services, known as essential health benefits. Essential health benefits must include items and services within at least the following 10 categories: ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services;...

Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), testified before the House Ways & Means Committee on Tuesday that the Obamacare enrollment system is “working.” “So what I can guarantee is we have a system that’s working. We’re gonna improve the speed of that system,” she said at the hearing on Obamacare enrollment. The Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, has been rife with problems for those trying to enroll in the health care insurance program. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) had asked Tavenner if she could guarantee that “no American will experience a gap in their health care.” Brady...

President Obama's nominee to be the next Director of the National Economic Council, Jeffrey Zients, has promised that, "By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users." But with even Obama's own campaign tech team doubting that the job can be done in that time, Democrats are beginning to consider what happened if HealthCare.gov fails again. The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn writes: Nobody questions that a poorly functioning website would cause serious problems, particularly for people who need to find new insurance by January. But, according to experts and industry sources I consulted over...

Covered California executive director Peter Lee told the Chronicle editorial board that he expects 800,000 to 900,000 people to lose their non-grandfathered private insurance policies on Dec. 31, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. (This figure — which is higher than past numbers reported – does not include small business coverage.) “The individual market is changing dramatically,” Lee said. What about President Obama’s promise that if people liked their plan, they could keep it? “I think it was not well stated,” Lee answered. Obama’s rhetoric “may have been an inarticulate way of describing what the realities are.” How many will...

October 29, 2013Rep. John Lewis compares opposition to Obamacare to racismAlex Pappas Georgia Rep. John Lewis on Tuesday compared Republican opposition to President Obama’s health-care law to racism. The Democratic lawmaker made the comments comparing the Republican resistance to Obamacare to the opposition to civil rights in the the 1950s during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing with Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Referencing the numerous Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare over the last several years, Lewis said: “Just reminds me of another period in our history. Not so long ago during...

An old saying reminds us that when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But the opposite is also true: if you plan to fail, you fail to plan. If the success of a project is not important to you, if you secretly hope that it will fail, then you will not be bothered to exercise the due diligence necessary to make it succeed. Does this explain the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare? Was the system designed to fail from the beginning? ObamaCare has always been based on an untenable contradiction. President Obama's rhetoric when he pushed through his signature...

I can’t tell exactly when Maryland’s health benefit exchange posted its new numbers, but it appears to be no earlier than late this afternoon — perfect timing...

Despite the intolerable failure of the Obama administration to warn the country that HealthCare.gov would not work at launch, there is still plenty of time for the government to make the required fixes. Even if it takes some weeks more to get the site in reasonable order, insurance buyers will probably have plenty of time to obtain coverage before running afoul of the penalty. The penalty against individuals lacking health-care coverage is a crucial tool in the effort to drive people into the new system. Delay it, and you’ll get fewer people signing up in the first part of next...

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin will propose a new law next week called: "If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It Act." “One of the most important promises made by President Obama and Democrat congressional leadership to promote the Affordable Care Act was that Americans who were satisfied with their health plans could keep them. That promise has been broken. More than a million Americans have been notified that the plans they like with the coverage they have chosen have been canceled. Millions more Americans will have the plans of their choice canceled in months to come,” says...