Boulder is a Stoopid Place

Charles Krauthammer: Obamacare laid bare – The Washington Post.

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.”

Period. It’s the elite inside the castle walls preaching to their minions. It’s time to ask yourself if you’re a minion. Perhaps if you’re part of the MSM that decided not to inform the public you qualify.

Back to Charles…

The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.

a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.

So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.

But perhaps Obama didn’t know.

….

Charles covers b & c with equal TTTTT for the strikeout but the conclusion sums it up…

Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.

So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.

And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge.

Don’t ask this president, because Obama-don’t-care.

Obama-don’t-care that his signature program uses deceptive advertising | WashingtonExaminer.com.

But the administration’s lies don’t end there. Obama had been claiming till as recently as last year that his law would force no one to give up coverage: “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

But the administration’s internal communications show that it knew back in 2010 that 12 to 93 million policy holders might well lose their coverage.

That’s when Sebelius issued regulations grandfathering policies so long as they didn’t change. If insurers so much as inflation-adjusted premiums, they lost their protected status, becoming subject to Obamacare’s mandates requiring them to cover everything from maternity services for elderly couples to drug rehab for teetotalers.

I don’t believe this is true. My policy is grandfathered and I can tell you the premiums went up. A lot.

All of this prompted even the Washington Post’s “fact” checkers this week to give Obama “Four Pinocchios.”

The whole point of Obamacare — aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — was to protect patients from greedy insurers who lure them when they are healthy only to use some arcane fine print to jack prices or dump them when they fall sick.

But the administration has engaged in similar behavior, showing that the profit motive is not the only corrupter in human affairs. Partisanship, ideology and — above all — a president’s need to leave a legacy are even more so.

When companies put profits ahead of people, the government can go after them for fraud and falsehood. But what should people do when the government puts politics ahead of people?

Don’t ask this president, because Obama-don’t-care.

Just to remind you about keeping your plan…

Class warfare –  Obamacare: Unfair to the young middle class, punished enough already – latimes.com.

What I mean by substandard is this. We’ve been hearing people complain that the Obamacare-approved policies cover too much, not too little. That’s part of the reason premiums are higher. But from my view, a higher monthly premium along with higher copays create a disincentive. Paying more to see a doctor means there’s less chance I’’ll use that service unless I’m absolutely desperate.

All of this isn’t simply idle hand-wringing. If young healthy people like myself feel we’re being taken advantage of, and opt out of purchasing insurance — paying the penalty instead — the healthcare exchanges will collapse. (The penalty in year one for opting out is only $95 or 1% of your salary, whichever is higher — far less than the cost of even the most basic insurance plan.)

When Obamacare comes fully online, it will do wonders to provide healthcare for people who were not eligible for Medicaid but still could not afford health insurance. If this system is going to be sustainable, however, we’re going to need to find a way to get older and wealthier Americans to chip in more. Because, right now, it’s young, middle-class people just outside the subsidy range who are biting the bullet. Young, middle-class people who already bore the highest toll in the recent financial collapse, who have seen our wages sliced and our job prospects dwindle.

You can only ride our backs for so long before we’re going to tell you enough is enough.

You go Mr. Fleischer. I will say this, old people have some of the same problems. The cheapest coverage I can get on the Colorado exchange is over 20% more than what I’m paying now for a higher maximum out of pocket. I don’t want all those bells and whistles either.

Although we’re years apart, we have more in common then you think.

Oh – Biden: Obama and I Aren’t ‘Technology Geeks,’ Thought Website Would Be Fine | National Review Online.

Obviously, neither is anyone else in your administration. Hands off management is one thing. Hands of management with your head up in the clouds in fantasy land is something all together different.

Too funny…