Posted on 10/12/2013 12:40:04 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
On health care, the president's pile of broken promises keeps getting higher. Consider this gem from Aug. 20, 2009: “Let's be clear about the fact that nobody has proposed anything close to a government takeover of health care.”
Well, yes, somebody did. President Obama is now well on his way to orchestrating the federal government's takeover of Americans' health care.
Commandeering the resources of major federal departments, particularly the Department of Health and Human Services and the IRS, the administration and its allies in Congress have created numerous federal bureaus, commissions and programs and have issued thousands of pages of rules, regulations, guidelines and directives, all reinforced by unprecedented mandates and new taxes, fees, fines and penalties. Central planning and coercion holds this sprawling thing together.
Virtually all key health care decisions will be made by government officials. Not you. Not your employer. Not your insurance company.
Beginning Jan. 1, government officials will require you to buy a federally approved health plan or pay federal fines or tax penalties. They will define and redefine, at their pleasure, the content of your health benefits package, meaning the medical treatments and procedures you must have; the kind and level of preventive health care services you must have; the level of coverage you must have; the level of cost sharing, deductibles and co-payments that are acceptable — to them, not you.
Writing in the October 2010 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, Sara Rosenbaum, professor of law at George Washington University and a supporter of the law, perhaps best described ObamaCare's transformative effect on private insurance: “It will take on certain characteristics of a public utility.” In other words, private insurance will be “private” in name only.
You will get what government officials say you will get.
Because the statutory language is often vague, “experts” at HHS and the IRS are free to write detailed regulations that cover a multitude of thorny items, such as the definition of “quality care” or “value” in doctor- or hospital-care delivery. Of course, officials who make the rules can make exceptions to the rules, issuing waivers, or exemptions, or securing special treatment for favored groups. The most obnoxious example is the Office of Personnel Management's decision to give hefty taxpayer subsidies to members of Congress and congressional staff to offset their premium costs in the new health insurance exchanges next year. Those special subsidies are bereft of statutory authority.
Government officials will exercise more control over the flow of your health care dollars and subject you to mandates and penalties. Your personal freedom will be curtailed by those who claim to know what is best for you.
Meanwhile, the president and his allies will insist that what you are witnessing firsthand is not a “government takeover” of health care.
You can either believe them or your own eyes.
This makes ObamaCare the precise equivalent of the Soviet Five-Year plans of the 1930s, in which campaigns to achieve fantastic industrial and agricultural quotas were kicked off with parades, speeches, and exhortations in Pravda and Trud. Five years later, with the numbers even worse than before, the party and government simply lied -- not only to the public, but to themselves as well. And then they embarked on yet another plan, with even more fireworks and speechifying. It worked fine, just as long as you didn't look at the piles of starved peasants on the roadsides.
As in the case of the Five-Year plans, there is no way that ObamaCare can be made to work. You simply cannot get from 12,500 up to the 7+ million required to keep the program going within any reasonable length of time. The premises on which ObamaCare are based are so alien to the actual operation of the universe itself that it can't even gain enough traction to get started.
And just think: the hackers haven't even hit it yet.
Has anybody asked Obama about his exit strategy, I wonder?"
---------------------------------
Fisher Adams: John Boehner: Conservative Hero? "........................ Democrats have revealed who they truly are: petty, petulant, mean-spirited, power-hungry, tax-and-spend bureaucrats who believe that no senior citizen's, military widow's, or war veteran's needs should stand in the way of their quest for power.
The American people had a dreamy, media-crafted vision of Obama prior to this that was largely furnished for him by his sycophants in the press. Benevolent, a uniter, above it all -- that image is now being shattered. People are seeing him for who he is. All you have to do is look at his paltry 37% approval rating to see the proof.
What this delay also does is give the American people a chance to interface with true incompetence. Let's be honest: if the American people had actually had a chance to tinker with and interface with ObamaCare prior to its passage, there's no way the bill ever would have become law. Boehner's delay gives the American public 6 more weeks to be face-to-face with the awful reality of essentially having the DMV run your health care.
By the time Obama and Boehner sit down in mid-/late November, there's a chance that public opinion of ObamaCare might be so low that Boehner won't have any trouble getting a one-year delay in the individual mandate. If not more!
I truly believe that Obama wanted this shutdown. But I don't believe for a second that he thought it was going to go like this. The media has been able to shield him from any blame or fault for nearly 5 years. But now that people can log on to a $634-million website and see his incompetence for themselves, concealing Obama as a miserable failure is too much to ask even for Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews.
I'm not a "fan" of John Boehner. I've seen him as a weak vacillator for almost the entirety of Obama's reign. But there's a huge difference between compromising on principle and compromising on tactics, and I'm not even going to pretend to know how this all ends. But up until now, there's been no doubt who has outplayed whom."
Second, elements of the government are malicious and spiteful. Of the 20 percent that have been affected by the shutdown, how many have been affected through pure malice? I know this is well-trod ground here in the Corner, but moving beyond the conservative echo-chamber, there were many, many Americans who experienced (or read about) truly needless government closings, saw absurd barricades closing open-air parks and even deserted scenic overlooks, and shook their heads in complete disbelief that the Penatagon couldn’t find the tiny amount of funds necessary to provide the most basic death benefits for America’s fallen. The government spent money to make Americans suffer. That will be remembered.
Third, the government can be staggeringly incompetent. Only 51,000 people have completed Obamacare applications in the first week of a very widely publicized operation? Healthcare.gov is barely functioning after spending more money to construct it than the combined costs of some of the most widely-trafficked and popular sites in the world? While examples of government incompetence are legion, given the sheer number of uninsured, Obamacare presents a problem that could well seep deep into the real-life experience of tens of millions of Americans. Republicans are fretting about losing a news cycle, but a news cycle pales in comparison to the real-world experience of Americans experiencing governmental disarray in one of the most important aspects of their lives — their health insurance............."
That’s what I’ve been sayin’!
“...the president’s pile of broken promises keeps getting higher.”
If the pile only had stairs, we could abolish NASA and walk to the moon.
Finally got my quote for my new insurance policy, via my insurance agent, who had special access and still needed two weeks to get into the system. I currently pay just under $1000 a month for my wife and me (hers is twice mine because of a pre-existing condition). That’s $5,000 deductible, self-employed people’s crappy insurance. We are the people the ACA was supposed to help: people over 50 without employer-provided coverage. It was supposed to improve our benefits (by giving us a lot of stuff we don’t need, like maternity and drug rehab), while lowering our costs by $2500 a year.
Actual results: The only thing even close to what we currently pay is a lousy HMO plan with a $6,000 deductible, and even that is $40 a month more than we pay now. To get anything close to what we now have will cost us $1292 a month, a $300-a-month increase, or $3600 MORE a year than we were paying before.
THANKS, OBAMA, you incompetent socialist moron!!!
Park Service Paramilitaries [King Obama's Deer] ".................At the same time as the National Park Service was holding legal foreign visitors under house arrest, it was also allowing illegal immigrants to hold a rally on the supposedly closed National Mall. At this bipartisan amnesty bash, the Democrat House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said she wanted to “thank the president for enabling us to gather here” and Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart also expressed his gratitude to the administration for “allowing us to be here.”
Is this for real? It’s not King Barack’s land; it’s supposed to be the people’s land, and his most groveling and unworthy subjects shouldn’t require a dispensation by His Benign Majesty to set foot on it......................"
God bless Texas!
Speaker Boehner is asking you to “SPEAK OUT.”
http://www.speaker.gov/contact
Send him what you just wrote.
Amendment 1
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the Government for a redress of grievances.
It is not up to the government to “allow us to be here.” That is a clear and flagrant violation of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights.
Not that anyone gives a sh*t anymore.
Interesting that Biden has been absent from the process of crapping on the Vets. Is it that he disapproves?
Oops. Wrong thread.
Harry Reid has ‘banished’ Biden for a while. Reid doesn’t want him involved because the Democraps feel that he “gives too much away” in negotiations. I suspect they’ve also kept him muzzled when the Vets/NPS situation started backfiring in their faces .... can’t you just imagine how bad the gaffes from Biden would be .... as in gasoline on the fire?
You’re a racist and a homophobe...
/s
So I’m told (Aren’t we all?).
....and white, and Christian and married.....
Spoke to friend, who relayed a story about another friend who tried to sign up for ObamaCare®.
He got the cheapest plan he thought he could afford and turns out he can’t even afford that.
He and his wife will be charged a bit over $500.00 per month, have a $10,000 deductible and a huge list of disallowables.
I laughed and asked how much money he would be out if he ended up at the hospital next year and the bill due was $4,000.
Lamely, he asked what I meant but, that was before he qualified his question saying that he can how people need this insurance and “What would happen if they needed medical care?”.
I laughed pretty hard and then said “Hey, you’re a doctor. You ought to know and understand the laws here in the US and further understand the disctinction between insurance and healthcare, medical necessity, treatment, etc.
You understand those terms right?”
He answered in the affirmative.
“So” I began my response “Let’s say your friend, next year, needs to go to the Emergency room or requires a small outpatient procedure and it costs $4,000.
He will pay $6,000 dollars for his mandated insurance no matter what next year and on top of that, with a $10,000 deductible he will pay a total of $10,000!”
“That doesn’t get into the disallowables, which in this case don’t matter as he has to overcome a $10,000 hurdle.
So, no matter what, your buddy pays $10,000 next year for insurance and actual medical care”
He responded that they guy couldn’t afford that and wondered what would happen.
“So, he gets a broken arm and goes to the hospital. They xray him, give him pain killers, set the arm, cast it, etc and then prescribe Vicodin.
Bottom line, the laws are such that the hospital must deliver medical care.”
He then wondered what would happen to his friend if he had catastrophic medical care.
“Well, if he can’t afford some crap insurance plan and $10,000 bucks would be more than he could financially bear, then we have do-overs in Murrica.
He can file Bankruptcy or Medical Bankruptcy if need be.”
He then acknowledged that the costs are built into our system.
“Yep” I said “Eff your friend and lets have another drink”
he was resigned to certain facts about life and life in Murrica.
Republicans will NOT get the kind of health care that Democrats will get.....this was all in the plan....they KNOW how we vote and who we give money to.
>> can’t you just imagine how bad the gaffes from Biden would be
Ironically, the Marxist dirtbags had higher approval ratings with Ol’ Joe around.
You probably like women to.
Makes me sick.
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