Free Republic

Psst. Anic-Pay! Bloomberg‘s Megan McArdle (who has been on an incredible roll lately**) takes issue with the idea that the Obama administration needn’t panic about Obamacare, as long as it can get its glitch-plagued health care exchanges up and running by the end of the year. Wrong, she suggests. It’s time to panic. Now. Why? Because the exchanges are the way to sign up young, healthy people and prevent the fabled “death spiral,” in which only older, sicker people sign up for insurance, causing rates to rise and healthier people to drop out, causing rates to rise even more, etc....

If you've tried to sign up online for health coverage under the problem-plagued Obamacare exchange, our sympathies. Many people have tried to create accounts and shop for insurance under the new law. Few have succeeded. Those that have enrolled have found that the system is prone to mistakes. Some applications have been sent to the wrong insurance company. Wait. It gets worse. Those who have managed to browse the marketplace have often been hit by sticker shock. Take Adam Weldzius, a nurse practitioner and single father from Carpentersville. He sought the same level of coverage on the exchange as he...

A New York Times investigative article based on two dozen interviews with industry insiders and confidential Obama Administration documents reveals that the catastrophic $500 million Obamacare rollout "has deeply embarrassed the White House" and has the technology companies involved "publicly distancing themselves" from the Obamacare fiasco. "These are not glitches. The extent of the problems is pretty enormous," an insurance executive who participated in Obamacare conference calls told the Times. "At the end of our calls, people say, 'It's awful, just awful.'"

A lot of people are wondering when the stock market will get back to fundamentals now that Janet Yellen has been named to replace Ben Bernanke. I won't really, or at least not in the way traditionalists look at such things.

".......A day that was supposed to bring Washington to the edge of resolving the fiscal showdown instead seemed to bring chaos and retrenching. And a bitter fight that had begun over stripping money from the president’s signature health care law had essentially descended in the House into one over whether lawmakers and their staff members would pay the full cost of their health insurance premiums, unlike most workers at American companies, and how to restrict the administration from using flexibility to extend the debt limit beyond a fixed deadline.............."

On a characteristically foggy evening here, a group of predominantly single venture capitalists, tech executives, hedge-fund managers and philanthropists gathered for a cocktail party in a penultimate-floor suite at the St. Regis apartment complex. As guests ate oysters, baby lamb chops and perhaps the world’s smallest cheeseburgers, they were pitched a multiday, intellectually rigorous singles mixer to be held in January 2014 on Necker Island, Richard Branson’s 74-acre Caribbean paradise, “curated” by Kelleher International, a long-running, high-end matchmaking service that is targeting Silicon Valley with particular vigor. Wearing an Alexander McQueen dress and towering Valentino heels as she sold the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Walmart has no regrets about allowing a wild shopping spree at two of its Louisiana stores when an electronic glitch lifted the spending caps on the cards of food stamp recipients. "We know we made the right choice," Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg told ABCNews.com today. The chain has no regrets even though Louisiana's Department of Children and Family Services said food stamp recipients should have been limited to $50 each during the emergency and that Walmart will have to pay the difference. Lundberg declined to comment about how much the company may have lost or why it did not follow...

This is very funny. A Daily Kos regular gets his Obamacare premium notice and is shocked to learn that as young, healthy people, he and his wife will pay twice as much! "My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don’t go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe. Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife’s rate is gong to...

Attorney: Divorce rate likely to rise under Obamacare SAN DIEGO — The Affordable Healthcare Act could make health coverage more affordable for some, but it may have other side effects, like an increase in the divorce rate. heart healthFamily practice attorney Myra Fleischer stressed how healthcare costs carry a heavyweight when it comes to those considering calling it quits on their marriage. “The middle class is what this is supposed to help and most divorces are middle class,” said Fleischer. “We look at those numbers and they choose to stay in the marriage,” said Fleischer who explained how that may...

EXCERPT:North Carolina has become the first state to cut off welfare benefits to poor residents in the wake of the partial federal government shutdown, ordering a halt to processing November applications until a deal is reached to end the federal standstill.

The United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia to become the world's biggest oil producer as the jump in output from shale plays has led to the second biggest oil boom in history, according to leading U.S. energy consultancy PIRA. U.S. output, which includes natural gas liquids and biofuels, has swelled 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) since 2009, the fastest expansion in production over a four-year period since a surge in Saudi Arabia's output from 1970-1974, PIRA said in a release on Tuesday. It was the latest milestone for the U.S. oil sector caused by the shale revolution, which has...

----"Plan B" and fiscal cliff vote, redux. Having hammered out a deal to shoot back to the Senate tonight -- with most Republicans reportedly on board -- House GOP leadership has been forced to delay or cancel those votes after support among conservatives collapsed in the early evening hours. The rules committee meeting, which would have formally drawn up the bill and advanced it to the full house, has been postponed indefinitely. The reason is simple. They don't have the votes: What happened? The counter-offer's broad outline, which I've been following all day, seemed to be on track. Then the...

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan will withhold money from Xerox Corp. because a technical problem crashed the state's debit card-style food stamps program over the weekend...

To those people paying only casual attention, the Occupy movement has become nothing more than a footnote in history. Their ragtag encampments have been removed for the most part, and there is little to indicate they made much of an impact. In Madison, Wisconsin, however, the Occupy movement has suddenly resurfaced, but with a totally new mission: addressing the basic needs of people who are homeless. As issues around collective bargaining rights for public employees and other significant alterations to the social contract were initiated by Governor Walker and the Republican-dominated legislature, Madison became famous for very loud and angry...

Survey: More Americans Trust GOP to Manage Economy BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff October 15, 2013 3:25 pm Approval ratings for Republican leadership in Congress may be at an all-time low, but a new survey shows that more Americans trust the GOP with handling the economy. A Pew Research survey said that 44 percent of Americans trusted Republicans more with managing the economy while 37 percent said they favored Democratic control of the economy. GOP Runs Even on Economy, Managing Government: More people continue to blame Republicans than the Obama administration for the government shutdown, and the GOP is widely...

Mr. Speaker: The debt limit exists for a simple reason: to assure that public debt isn’t recklessly piled up without Congress periodically acknowledging it and addressing the spending patterns that are causing it. If a debt limit increase is supposed to be automatic, as the President suggests, there really is no purpose to it. A new dimension has now appeared in this discussion. Unlike every one of his predecessors, this President has vowed that unless Congress unconditionally raises the debt limit, the United States will default on its sovereign debt. But a failure to raise the debt limit would not...

The hallmark of the Obama era is government of, for and by crisis. Elected amid (or possibly because of) a financial crisis, the Panic of 2008, President Obama has spent his time in office lurching from disaster to disaster. Obama’s reflexes, praised instinctive timing and audacious as a candidate, turn out to be poorly suited to high office. Obama has been mostly reactive and mostly captive to events. Veering here and there is part of being president. The world is big and dangerous and governance is hard. But watching Obama govern is like watching a distracted man flipping through television...

European Union officials on Tuesday approved the creation of a centralized banking supervisor, marking another step in the 28-country bloc’s long quest to stabilize its financial system. Finance ministers at a meeting in Luxembourg cleared the final legal hurdle to the establishment of the new banking supervisor, which will be operated by the European Central Bank and directly oversee the bloc’s 130 biggest banks.“Now we will start hiring supervisors, rent buildings and start the coming (bank) stress test,” ECB executive board member Joerg Asmussen said. The so-called single supervisory mechanism will be based with the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany, and...

Aetna's CEO gave a harshly critical review Monday of the federal government's Obamacare marketplace, saying, "There's so much wrong, you just don't know what's broken until you get a lot more of it fixed."

Starting in 2015, high-tech shelves, equipped with built in cameras could appear in grocery stores to watch us and get intelligence.

House Republican leaders are preparing legislation that would fund the government until Dec. 15, extend the debt ceiling until Feb. 7 and strike the health care subsidies that members of Congress, White House appointees and staff were set to receive under the new health care law, a GOP lawmaker said. Under the new House GOP proposal — the second one they proposed Tuesday — union workers would also remain subject to a $63 health insurance tax from which they had sought an exemption. The proposal also would give the House and Senate until mid-December negotiate a new, long-term budget. "The...

Smoking has returned to New York state's 178 public parks. Last Tuesday, state Supreme Court Justice George Ceresia ruled that the smoking ban the Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historical Preservation instituted last year exceeded the authority of the agency. The ban has officially been struck down. Additionally, the judge said that the state must remove any no-smoking signs that were erected because of the ban. The ruling was a result of a lawsuit filed against the state by NYC C.L.A.S.H. (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harrassment), a smoker advocacy group who argued that the state park smoking ban opposed the...

The media, members of Congress, and the President of the United States have gleefully disseminated misinformation about what would happen if we do not raise the debt ceiling by October 17th. The biggest blow these lies encountered was when Moody’s, one of the nation's top credit rating agencies, released a memo on October 7th stating: “We believe the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact...The debt limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming revenues; it does not prohibit...

Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, told Tom Keene and Sara Eisen on "Bloomberg Television" today "there is no safe haven. The best you can hope for is that you have a diversified portfolio of different assets and that they don't all collapse at the same time." On the debt ceiling debate in Washington, Faber said, "It's basically a dysfunctional government that we have that is far too large that is essentially wasting money left, right and center. The Republicans are wasting money on the military complex and the Democrats are basically buying votes with transfer...

President Obama thinks he can prevail in the government shutdown fight by deliberately making life as difficult as possible for the maximum number of ordinary Americans. We’ve seen this before. After suffering a defeat on the sequester, he made himself a laughingstock (as illustrated by these cartoons) with his Chicken-Little warnings that a tiny bit of fiscal restraint would grind government to a halt. But his sequester hysterics are trivial compared to what the Obama Administration is doing today with the National Park Service. Here are some unbelievable excerpts from Mark Steyn’s funny yet horrifyingNational Review column. …the one place...

House Republicans scrambled Tuesday to convince their skeptical conservative flank to support a new plan to end the government shutdown and lift the debt ceiling. Rank-and-file GOP lawmakers pushed back on the original plan from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his lieutenants, seeking more sweeteners to what was essentially a framework crafted by the Senate. The impasse sidelined the Senate, which on Monday appeared close to a tentative deal. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suspended their recent talks, as the Senate GOP sought to give Boehner more maneuvering room. “I don’t know if anything...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than half of low-wage workers employed by the largest U.S. fast-food restaurants earn so little that they must rely on public assistance to get by, according to a study released on Tuesday. This ends up costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars a year, the study said. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and public benefit programs show 52 percent of fast-food cooks, cashiers and other "front-line" staff had relied on at least one form of public assistance, such as Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit program, between 2007 and 2011, researchers at...

A federal workers union is demanding that President Barack Obama declare the shutdown a national emergency and force businesses, hospitals, and schools to forgive workers’ bill payments until a deal is reached. American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox sent a letter to Obama on Friday lamenting that the lengthy shutdown would hurt government workers. He proposed that the White House intervene to declare the shutdown a federal emergency, which would allow workers to collect zero-interest loans from FEMA and force businesses to extend lines of credit to employees.

What do mythical figures and Obamacare enrollees have in common? (Have you heard this one before?) The Miami Herald calls them “urban-legends.” Others have called them “non-existent.” One thing is for sure: They are certainly rare. People who have successfully enrolled through the now comically plagued exchanges are unsurprisingly difficult to track down. According to the Miami Herald, “individuals who have successfully used the choked-up website to enroll for a subsidized health insurance plan have reached a status akin to urban legend: Everyone has heard of them, but very few people have actually met one.” And that’s not just true...

The Obama administration has been mighty pleased with themselves and the various ways in which they have stepped up their climate-change game with impunity, mainly through aggressive regulatory maneuvering (most recently with their new plans to essentially regulate new coal-plant construction out of existence paired with their forthcoming plans to regulate existing coal plants next year). The Obama administration has been discouraging the Supreme Court from providing a platform for the inevitable legal challenges to their emissions-capping agenda, but to no avail: The highest court in the land decided to hear out the consolidated arguments against the Environmental Protection Agency’s...

According to a new study conducted by Texas Tech University Professor Dr. Michael Giberson for the Institute for Energy Research, the government and wind lobby aren't telling taxpayers the whole truth about how much wind energy really costs. The study comes as the wind lobby is set to receive another extension on massive subsidies with little results to show for it. "As Big Wind's lobbyists fight tooth and nail to extend the wind Production Tax Credit, it is important that we look at the true costs of wind power to taxpayers and ratepayers," IER President Thomas Pyle said about...

When over the weekend, a Xerox "glitch" shut down the EBT system, better known as foodstamps, for nearly the entire day across 17 states leaving millions without "funding" to pay for food leading to dramatic examples of the basest human behavior possible, some of the more conspiratorial elements saw this merely as a dress rehearsal for what may be coming in the immediate future. While there was no basis to believe that is the case, a USDA (the currently shuttered agency that administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) memo obtained by the Crossroads Urban Center in Utah carries in it...

When Mary Porter enrolled last year at East Central Community College in Rolla, Mo., she landed a job at a fast-food restaurant and worked full-time for minimum wage to pay the bills. Things were looking up for the budding college student, who had grown up a ward of the state’s foster care system. But earlier this year, Porter’s hours were cut. Her employer cited the Affordable Care Act as the reason, she told The College Fix. “Then they told us that they couldn’t afford to pay us health insurance,” said Porter, 22, who is no longer allowed to work more...

To judge by the headlines and media chatter, the only important issue involving American Indians in Washington these days has to do with changing the name of the local pro football team. Those who care about real-world Indians might want to focus instead on how the Obama administration's hostility to the coal industry does more harm to Native Americans than any NFL franchise ever will. The Environmental Protection Agency recently ramped up its attack on coal by issuing stringent limits on carbon-dioxide emissions from new coal-fired generating plants, and the agency has more regulations in the works for existing power...

If a US default on interest and principal payments were to happen, make no mistake it would be a default of choice. Obama’s choice, that is. But he wouldn’t be the only one defaulting. Nor is he the only one to blame here. In order for the United States government to default on paying interest on the debt that we owe, a series of decisions would have to issue from the White House that would prevent those payments in the first place. There is enough money to prevent default, just not enough to keep the rest of the government...

KARACHI: Exchange companies ran out of cash as dollar selling skyrocketed on Monday, with the turnover shooting up to 200 to 300 per cent above than the normal days. Long queues of people were seen at exchange companies all over the country. “This was absolutely a selling day and we estimate that more than $35 million were deposited in the banking system by the exchange companies,” said Exchange Companies Association of Pakistan chairman Malik Bostan. He said the exchange companies had deposited about $100 million in the banking system during the last week. The heavy dollar selling depreciated the value...

According to multiple reports, Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are close to a deal to reopen the federal government and lift the debt ceiling. The deal would fund the federal government through January 15, and lift the debt ceiling until February 15. Attached to that would be a pair of minor provisions. Republicans would get some kind of assurance that people can't lie about their income to get Obamacare, and Democrats would get the delay of a small "reinsurance tax" that was intended to expire after three years anyway (and which unions hated). This is a huge win for...

MADISON – Better than expected. That’s been the story of state revenue and surplus in Wisconsin over the past year and a half. An improving economy has pushed the state’s surplus up to $759.2 million, according to the Wisconsin Department of Administration State Controller’s Office’s Annual Fiscal Report released Monday. That’s up nearly $90 million from the last budget estimate earlier this year, and an increase of $274.5 million higher than the $484.7 million projected in the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s 2013 re-estimates in January. Word of the better-than expected balance, which doesn’t take into account the hundreds of millions of...

Think you’re exempt from Obamacare’s individual mandate? Good luck proving it. The health law’s least popular component — the requirement to obtain insurance or face a tax penalty — also features a lengthy list of exceptions for people facing certain hardships like foreclosure, domestic violence or homelessness. Members of certain religious sects or Native American tribes also are exempt. But if the online system for getting into Obamacare coverage is rickety, the system for getting out of the mandate doesn’t even exist yet. HHS says it will take another month at least for the administration to finalize the forms. The...

Some health insurance brokers are setting up states that mimic the name and look of the official state exchanges. But the fake sites are easily identifiable because, unlike the official sites, they work. (Snip) The unofficial sites can sell real insurance plans however those plans have not been certified by the government and are therefore not eligible for government subsidies. So if you log on to a health insurance exchange site that seems to be working properly, caveat emptor.

When you place power in the hands of inept idiots, then you foster the rule of “ineptocracy.” You give power to the least capable and the least deserving. In the process, you may wonder why there is less and less in society to admire and enjoy. It’s because the idiots given the power they never deserved are not capable of producing anything. I ran across a t-shirt that says everything about the state of our country today: Ineptocracy: A system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members...

An advocacy group for K Street is moving forward with a rebranding effort that will remove the word “lobbyist” from its name. The board of the American League of Lobbyists (ALL) on Tuesday announced it has recommended to members that the group change its name to the Association of Government Relations Professionals. The group says the board “overwhelmingly” backed the name change as a way to more accurately “represent the range of associated professions involved in the government affairs, lobbying and public affairs community.” ALL officially began moving forward with the rebranding effort last month, as first reported by The...

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday cautioned against “spiking the football” on a budget deal, predicting a long slog ahead to convince the GOP conference to go along with any plan. He expressed embarrassment at members of his own party who waged a fight to delay or defund ObamaCare — saying it was doomed to failure from the beginning. “To be candid, it is an embarrassment that we have spent all this time on a rabbit trail leading us to where we are,” he said. “Look, I may not be the best person to be interviewed this morning. We have...

House Republicans will vote Tuesday on a more conservative version of the Senate fiscal deal that would include a delay of Obamacare's medical device tax and scrapping of subsidies for members of Congress and top Cabinet officials, lawmakers and aides said. The bill would modify an emerging Senate plan crafted by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), but retain that deal's extension of the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. It would also keep the Senate measure's plan of funding the government through Jan. 15 and immediately end the shutdown. That's a shift from last weekend,...

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.

<p>States across the country are being told to stop the supplemental nutrition assistance program for the month of November, pending further notice.</p> <p>That’s according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Fox 13 obtained a copy from the Crossroads Urban Center in downtown Salt Lake City. Crossroads says if Utah families don’t get food stamps, they’ll turn to the local food pantries, which are already strapped due to the government shutdown. Homeless people Fox 13 talked to, some who use SNAP, say losing food stamps would mean going hungry.</p>

Senior executives from CGI Federal -- the company that won the Obamacare website contract -- enjoyed high-level access to top Obama administration officials, according to White House visitors' logs. CGI Federal is the U.S. subsidiary of CGI Group, the Canadian company based in Montreal that won the $93 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services in December 2011 to build Healthcare.gov, the main Obamacare web site. Prior to the official award, senior CGI executives met with top White House officials and attended a number of invitation-only addresses by President Obama.

Consumer advocates and aid organizations say the breaking point has already been reached. Today, more than 300,000 households a year are seeing their power shut off because of unpaid bills. Caritas and other charity groups call it "energy poverty." Lawmakers, on the other hand, have largely ignored the phenomenon. In the concluding legislative period, the government and opposition argued passionately over a €5 increase in payments to the long-term unemployed. But no one paid much attention to the fact that those welfare recipients would subsequently see the extra €5 wiped out by higher electricity bills. It is only gradually becoming...

A man beaten unconscious in May after he stopped for gas in north Baton Rouge filed a lawsuit against Stadium Chevron, claiming the gas station failed to provide security at night in a neighborhood long plagued by violent crime. *** The litigation stems from a racially charged assault that generated outrage in Baton Rouge and prompted calls for Dickerson to be charged with a hate crime. Ray, 42, had been on his way to get something to eat with his family when they stopped at the Chevron after dark. Ray’s 15-year-old daughter told police and FBI officials she was worried...