Obamacare Is Not So Bad After All

News Buzzard wrote:It's interesting when Republican business leaders in Texas are saying it!

http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/blog/2015/02/obamacare-s-not-so-bad-after-all-business-leaders.html?ana=yahoo&page=all

If you decided to skip health insurance this year, consider this: Unless you can prove you have a valid excuse, you will be liable for a penalty during the coming tax season — and the time to start making your case is now.
NYTs

Gruber’s baaaaaa-aaaaack, and badder than ever. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephanie Armour got 20,000 pages of e-mail from the House Oversight Committee that MIT professor Jonathan Gruber exchanged with the White House on ObamaCare, making it clear that he played a far more integral role in its development than the Obama administration acknowledged after videos emerged of Gruber contradicting their position on King v Burwell. The e-mails cover 14 months and demonstrate intense involvement from the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency to the passage of the Affordable Care Act:


Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist whose comments about the health-care law touched off a political furor, worked more closely than previously known with the White House and top federal officials to shape the law, previously unreleased emails show.

The emails, provided by the House Oversight Committee to The Wall Street Journal, cover messages Mr. Gruber sent from January 2009 through March 2010. Committee staffers said they worked with MIT to obtain the 20,000 pages of emails. …

The emails show frequent consultations between Mr. Gruber and top Obama administration staffers and advisers in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services on the Affordable Care Act. They show he informed HHS about interviews with reporters and discussions with lawmakers, and he consulted with HHS about how to publicly describe his role.

Politically, at least, it makes it a little more difficult to distance Obama and his team from repeated remarks like this from Gruber:

More than one video has emerged of Gruber making similar comments.

Also, remarks in the e-mails themselves from White House staffers calling Gruber “our hero” make Obama’s description of Gruber’s relationship to the team look particularly dishonest. Shortly after a series of videos emerged showing Gruber’s contempt for Americans, Obama told reporters that Gruber was just “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” The MIT e-mails show that Gruber got invited to consult Obama directly, making the President look like a liar on what would normally be a petty issue, had Gruber not repeatedly shot off his mouth in public about the strategies employed to deceive American voters.

The Gruber videos caught the attention of the public for two reasons. One, it showed the dishonesty of the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress over how this program was both sold and written. Two, Gruber’s arguments directly contradict what the Obama administration has represented in its arguments to the Supreme Court in King v Burwell. Politically, these e-mails are a disaster. Legally, they won’t mean anything at all. The court decided King weeks ago, if not months, and we’re only waiting for the decision and opinions to emerge.

Finally, why did Oversight have to go to MIT to get these e-mails? This should have been provided to Oversight from the White House. The sheer volume alone of these communications show that Gruber’s role was critical in the process of ObamaCare. To compare, recall that Hillary Clinton turned over what she said were the complete set of work-related e-mails from four years at the State Department — and that came up to 50,000 pages of communications. And no one believes that it comprises the complete set of e-mails, either, especially after Sidney Blumenthal’s subpoena found dozens that no one knew existed.

This pattern of hiding e-mails and some advisers wasn’t limited to the State Department, in other words. Looks like this may have been the Obama administration mantra.
Hot Air

Higher costs, less care, fewer choices. And lots more federal control

The recent Supreme Court ruling on health insurance subsidies means they upheld the “stupidity of the American people” (as Jonathan Gruber would say, and has), and for the third time the Court stretched the law instead of interpreting the law.

How the Court arrived at this 6-3 decision has baffled many observers, and the ruling opinion written by Justice Roberts stuns those of us who believe that certain words matter, as Rob said last week.

But the words of Justice Antonio Scalia in his the dissenting opinion had plenty of meaning:

“Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an ‘Exchange established by the State.’ This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...

News Buzzard wrote:ObamaCare is not so bad after all.

"On March 23, 2010, Barack Obama signed the “Affordable” Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare) into law. It’s time we give it a checkup for its six-year anniversary. Via Investor’s Business Daily, here are seven of its most significant shortcomings:

1.) Taxpayers will probably not recuperate $1.2 billion (a figure almost guaranteed to rise) after 12 of ObamaCare’s 23 co-ops collapsed.

2.) The federal government distributed $5 billion to the states to help set up their own exchanges, but already $1.5 billion (a figure also bound to increase) of that has been wasted.

3.) Healthcare.gov, the $2 billion federally operated marketplace disaster, “was supposed to be self-financed, [but] Obama wants an additional $535 million to keep it running next year.”

4.) Many insurance companies are operating deep in the red, so the White House is “diverting $3.5 billion meant for the Treasury to insurance companies to help cover losses.”

5.) About 500,000 fraudulent beneficiaries received roughly $750 million in ObamaCare subsidies.

6.) The IRS needs an additional $881 million to cover the added workload from ObamaCare.

7.) And finally, “An analysis by the American Action Forum concluded that businesses and individuals have spent 165 million hours to comply with ObamaCare’s 106 new regulations. In dollar terms, that works out to $45 billion.”


“Add it all up and it comes out to $55 billion,” writes Investor’s. “And that’s being generous to ObamaCare. This figure doesn’t count what families forced off health plans they liked had to pay in to buy ObamaCare’s overpriced insurance. Or the adverse impact ObamaCare has had on the labor market. Nor does it count the vast amounts of waste and fraud in Medicaid before ObamaCare vastly expanded eligibility.”

When he signed the bill six years ago, Obama said, “This legislation will … lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades. It is paid for. It is fiscally responsible. And it will help lift a decades-long drag on our economy.”

Every year it gets older, it’s clear ObamaCare was a huge mistake. Let’s birth a new kind of health care reform.
Investors Daily