Posted on 10/26/2013 5:21:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
One huge political question surrounds the catastrophic launch of Obamacare: Will the administration's double-talk, cancelled insurance contracts, terminated doctor-patient relationships, sticker shock from higher premiums and deductibility, and damage to job hiring and economic growth get the GOP off the shutdown hook for the 2014 midterm elections?
That is the question. Donald Rumsfeld would call it a known unknown. And right now nobody knows the answer.
But Christopher Ruddy, founder and CEO of Newsmax, makes an interesting point about this: “The key to stopping Obamacare is for its opponents to win in congressional elections in 2014. Delaying Obamacare only helps the Democrats who support this boondoggle.”
So far, with all the problems plaguing the Obamacare website, Senator Marco Rubio is leading the Republican charge to delay the March 31 enrollment deadline and tax penalty. And a lot of Republicans are lining up behind him. But is that the right tactic? On the Democratic side, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and nine of her colleagues are urging the White House to push back the same deadline. But is that just to save their reelection hides next November?
Now, Obama recently appointed a new team to fix the website. And that team promptly predicted a successful fix by the end of November. So if that happens, it’s possible the whole Obamacare-disaster issue dies.
But according to highly respected health-industry expert Bob Laszewski, the chances of that are low. He says it will take at least a year to fix the “back end” problems -- the technical links between the website, the HHS, and most importantly the insurance companies, which are receiving massively error-laden information.
Laszewski says this is more important than the front-end disaster, where somebody in the Obama administration -- literally at the last minute in mid-September -- gave the order that the website require a detailed account-registration process before a user can shop for insurance.
Nobody knows why that decision was made. Perhaps it was to stop the media from seeing unsubsidized premium prices that undermine Obama’s promise for cheaper insurance. Or maybe the Obama folks wanted to block potential registrants from pricing-structure sticker shock. Either way, the decision to put registration ahead of shopping blew up the whole system.
And it may also have blown up Obama’s attempt to break the Republican party in half and carry a Democratic House in 2014.
And that’s Ruddy’s point: If Republicans hold the House and win the Senate next year, there’d be two houses to repeal Obamacare. But if the March 31 delay effort works, will voters forgive and forget a botched website launch?
Experts like Laszewski are now talking about the possibility of 16 million people getting pink slips for their current insurance. That’s no insurance. No doctor. Nothing. Already, over 1 million people have lost their insurance, with cancellation notices actually soaring above Obamacare enrollment rates.
Of course, President Obama said none of this would happen. Remember? But everything has changed. And unless the system gets fixed by January 1, a lot of folks are going to be very angry as they’re left out in the cold.
Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal calls the whole Obamacare effort a con job. By that he means a key Obama constituency, the young and healthy, are not going to buy overpriced insurance policies. They are the losers. And the winners are the older and sicker shoppers who allegedly are going to be subsidized by the young.
But the young are not stupid. They’d rather pay the minor tax penalty to stay out of this mess. And that means the system may go bankrupt because older and sicker customers will experience soaring premiums if the young and healthy don’t show up to subsidize their care.
And guess who’s going to do that subsidizing? We are. The taxpayers. And the whole cost structure of Obamacare will take another giant leap upwards -- above the CBO’s already tripled cost estimates.
The net economic effects of Obamacare also will become more apparent as large companies with heavy numbers of low-wage workers cut back on hiring, reduce hours worked, take on part-timers whenever possible, and send their workers into the Obama exchanges. But those workers won’t wind up in the exchanges. They’ll end up in Medicaid, which is already going bankrupt.
And who’s paying for that bailout? We are. The taxpayers.
The mainstream media have in large part turned against Obamacare, and all these factoids are going to be reported. So that raises the question regarding 2014: Do Republicans really want to bail out Obama by handing him a year’s delay? If all the flaws in Obamacare do pan out, they may well overshadow the shutdown negatives suffered by the GOP.
I think I am lining up on Chris Ruddy’s side. There’s an old political adage: If your opponent is determined to hang himself, for Heaven’s sake, don’t take away the rope.
I couldn't agree more.
Except that the RINOs in both houses will be screaming: "Mend it, don't end it."
Delaying ObamaCare delays the pain that most Americans will eventually feel. The sooner Americans feel the pain, the sooner they will revolt.
If ObamaCare is delayed, it will eventually be too late to reverse course. Insurance companies will be forced into bankruptcy and the only alernative will be the government (single payer).
It’s best to destroy ObamaCare while the current system is still in place.
-——And right now nobody knows the answer.-——
Actually, Larry Sabato provided the answer. He even quantified it.
The 17 days of shut down bad news will be forgotten in the seemingly unending process of screwing around with Obamacare are website and then followed by the disaster of outrageous cost in creases.
I concur with that analysis. The Republicans should talk, analyze, project thoughts but actually do nothing.
The truth is, nothing can be done to mitigate the debacle. It is what it is, a disaster.
I generally like Kudlow as an economist, but it’s important to remember that he is helplessly conventional establishment in his thinking politically...even as he is tea party in his economics. Chris Ruddy of Newsmax is very establishment too, even as he makes a ton of money on tea party email blasts.
So that begs the question: but are they right on this strategy? This is a black swan moment in history of sorts....so it’s tough to say. One think Kudlow is wrong about is his fear of a shutdown backlash for 2014. That didn’t even happen in 95-96 and won’t now either....so his fear is ungrounded. And I don’t think people really forget Obama Care even if delayed?
But again, are they right?
Rarely would I agree with the tool Sabato over Kudlow...but in this case, Sabato is correct. The shutdown will be a zillion miles away by 2014 elections. It already is in fact.
Obama Care is too big. It is the 800 pound gorilla....who is loud, ugly, and smells bad.
Too late. The new talking points will be that Obamacare failed because of the GOP obstructing it at every point. The MSM will run with this.
...and the POS in the White House would veto it anyway.
Why the House isn’t going after BO for his delays and waivers for corporations and unions is beyond me. Like other laws he picks and choose to enforce it’s unconstitutional period. POSOTUS should be in federal prison along with his wife for the NO BID CONTRACT for her Princeton classmate who is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.
Endless in your face crimes with no repercussions.
There needs to be another front opened in this war.
We all know that between now and November 2014, the media will spin this for the rats and they will be successful at it.
So we need to go after the media as well as Democrats up for reelection in Red states. Stories that changed, positions that changed need to be hammered hard. Ethics charges against rat reporters, heck accuse them of animal molestation. Anything to get them to back off.
We have the momentum here. Take away the oppositions message is how we win.
Someone asked me just the other day why I was so pessimistic about the Republican party's chance of winning the White Hut. My answer; Just look and read.
One of the Left’s favorite talking-points now is that the Republicans should be helping to “fix” this settled law instead of trying to end it. I’ve yet to hear one Congressman or conservative pundit reply that you can’t fix Socialism, but I can dream.
Unfortunately the Republican party can’t be unified until we take out the trash in next year’s election, so our only hope is to splinter the Democrats. I would like to see the Republicans agree on what we are willing to propose. I suggest repealing all regulations and taxes associated with the Affordable Health Care act. Absolutely no delays, absolutely no minor fixes. Let’s give every Democrat running for re election next year lots of chances to vote against that idea in the next few months.
let Obamacare fail.
The CBO people who scored that damned thing revenue-neutral should be tried, convicted, taken outside and shot. Literally. I'm not exaggerating or speaking rhetorically. We hanged Nazis for less.
I have been saying this all along. Give the Dems everything they want except more money and let this law crash and burn of it’s own oppressive weight.
No Delay...now is the time to push for REPEAL!
1) Every day thousands and thousands of innocent Americans are losing their insurance policies and being cast into a situation in which they cannot acquire new health insurance because the system has broken down and/or because the insurance available under Obamacare is prohibitively expensive.
It is imperative that any opposition taken by Republicans against delay or modification of Obamacare not be played in the press as making this misery the Republicans fault.
2) Obama himself evidently has the unilateral, albeit unconstitutional, power to delay the imposition of the individual mandate by Fiat.
It is imperative that Obama be placed in the position before he can do so that makes the debacle his fault and makes it clear that a unilateral delay is not made out of concern for Americans cast without insurance onto a broken computer system, but out of a selfish concern to protect Democrats in November 2014. The Republicans should advance other remedies making it more difficult for Obama to act unilaterally.
3) Litigation will no doubt proliferate and it is important that the Republicans do not sign onto any legislation which might cure claims in such litigation which could conceivably bring down Obamacare either because it's unconstitutional or because its application is unconstitutional and without that application the whole system disintegrates.
4) Whatever the Republicans do, they must do it in unison-an unrealistic demand I know but if the Rinos in the Senate especially cave on this they should expect all out war in the party.
5) You're Absolutely right under no circumstances should a delay bring the reckoning past the November 2014 election and it should be so constructed that the world is fully apprised well in advance of that election of the pain Obamacare will inflict on millions of Americans.
6) Obama himself must be morally destroyed all as is set forth in my vanity, No Time for Schadenfreude, Get out in Front Now
Point 1 is the tricky one.....because of point 4 as well as inherent cross currents going on in both parties now.
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