Delay Obamacare

Obamacare, the horribly mis-named Affordable Care Act, is not ready for prime time. Its failures have been showing up in the news for months and months. Even President Barack Obama has admitted it's not ready to function — by his actions though not his words. He has made this admission by unilaterally delaying a whole series of Obamacare provisions, something the language of the law does not allow him to do. Just as examples:

• He has delayed the employer mandate by a year, apparently both because the Health & Human Services (HHS) Department isn't ready to make it work and to delay its impact on jobs until after the 2014 elections.
   
• He has delayed for a year the income verification necessary to confirm eligibility for subsidies. This opens the door to massive fraud, as large as that which has plagued Medicare and Medicaid for so long.
   
• He has delayed for at least a year implementation of even the most basic data security in the insurance exchanges, because HHS can't get the security software written and tested in time. This means everyone who gives information to the exchanges will have an extremely high risk of identity theft. (And that's not counting the fact that many of the "navigators" hired to help people get through the process have not completed their background checks, and some of those whose background checks have been completed were revealed to be convicted felons.)
   
• He has delayed for a year the law's caps on out-of-pocket expenses, so an awful lot of people are going to find their health care a lot more expensive than they expect.

What Obama's really saying is that it's right and appropriate to delay virtually every provision of Obamacare — so long as the Republicans don't suggest it. But what the Republicans are asking is that this vast new entitlement be held to at least the most basis requirements of due diligence, or to be prudently delayed until it can meet even these most basic standards. It's telling that Barack Obama and the Democrats can't even accept that.

Obamacare is not ready to run. It should be delayed until it's at least close.

Nancy Pelosi famously said "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it." Now we're finding out "what's in it", and only hyperpartisans like it.The senator who helped write the bill says it's a "train wreck". The unions helped get Obamacare passed, then asked for and got waivers so they don't have to live under it, and now want it scrapped because of how much it's going to cost them. Congressmen and senators — and their high-paid staffs — also complain they can't afford Obamacare insurance. If they can't afford it at their salaries, how can they expect ordinary folks like most of the middle class to be able to? Now, to add insult to injury, Obama has decided to pay most of the insurance cost for the Congress and their staffs. My objections include
    1. This is a flagrant violation of equal protection.
    2. These people foisted Obamacare on us, and should be made to live
         under it themselves.
If Obamacare is good enough for us, then it's good enough for our public servants (and the unions). (In fact, that's almost exactly what Congressman Huelskamp said on MSNBC.) Other Obama fundraisers and supporters have also gotten waivers. Even big Obamacare cheerleader AARP has asked for, and received, a waiver. Since the big Obama supporters (and, accidentally, a few others) are getting waivers and won't have to put up with Obama's signature legislation, Obamacare is looking more and more like it's simply a punishment being enacted against those of us who are not sufficiently supportive of our Dear Leader.

Obamacare has already cost us a lot in money and jobs. It has been damaging our economy since the day it was signed. Now it appears Obamacare may actually increase the number of people without health insurance, when the whole rationale for its passage was to give them insurance. And what do we get from Obama's minions?

Things That Aren't So

President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been talking a lot about how the Republicans — especially those in the House of Representatives — wnat to shut down the government because, they say, the Republicans oppose all government. They claim the Republicans are insisting the Senate meet their demands or the government will be shut down. And their compatriots in the mainstream media parrot these claims.

But there's a problem with these claims. Part of it is that it's Barack Obama and Harry Reid who have said they won't negotiate at all, not the Republicans. Their idea of a deal is their opponents accede to their demands. Yes, Harry Reid is demanding that House Republicans take orders from him, or the government will be shut down. The Republicans have offered various different proposals.

So, in reality, who's being intransigent? Who is, in reality, trying to produce a government shutdown?

President Obama and Senator Reid say they want to preserve Obamacare unchanged. Indeed,

Mr. Obama also refuses to bend on any part of ObamaCare — except when he unilaterally announces bending in his own political interest. He decided on his own, and contrary to the plain text of the law, to delay for a year the business mandate to provide insurance for employees. He also unilaterally delayed verifying the income of Americans seeking subsidies. He did this to pile more people into the ObamaCare exchanges, lest they fail, and to limit the harm to job creation before 2014.

Yet now he'd rather see the government shut down than accept the ObamaCare compromises that House Republicans have put in their latest government funding bill. He refuses to delay the law for a year though his own actions reveal it is not ready for prime time. And he won't even accept repeal of the medical-device tax that 79 Senators, including 33 Democrats, are on record as supporting. The tax is already hurting innovation and sending jobs overseas.

That's not even counting Obama's unilateral delay in the law's caps on patient out-of-pocket expenses (contrary to the provisions of the law), the waiver from Obamacare's provisions he gave to Congress and its staffers (violating Constitutional equal protection provisions), and all the waivers he and his head of the Health & Human Services Department have given to all his union friends. Perhaps Obama and Reid think unionists and Congressmen (and their staffs) are "more equal than others."

Yet these folks keep saying Obamacare will be good for everyone and good for the country. But

if Obamacare is so great, why don’t Congress and President Obama have to enroll in it? If it’s good enough for the rest of the country, Huelskamp said, “it should be good enough for the President of the United States.”

Sounds like more regime dishonesty to me. And yet another violation of Constitutional equal protection.

Obama and Reid want to blame the Republicans, but

it takes two to tangle, and Mr. Obama is as much to blame for the partisan pileup as Mr. Cruz. This is a President who is eager to negotiate with dubiously elected Iranian mullahs but can't abide compromise with duly elected leaders of Congress. He refuses to negotiate at all over an increase in the federal debt limit, claiming this has never happened. Like so much that Mr. Obama says, he knows this is false. His own staff suggested the spending sequester during the 2011 debt debate, and Democratic Congresses have used the debt limit to extract concessions from Republican Presidents. [emphasis added]

And then there's this, continuing on the theme of things the Obama people are saying that simply aren't true:

Once again tonight I heard Secretary of State John Kerry claiming on 60 Minutes that Iraq under Saddam Hussein didn't have chemical weapons — that the intelligence that he did was wrong — despite the fact that even John Kerry and others in the Obama regime have acknowledged that Saddam Hussein used those (nonexistent) weapons against Iran and against Iraq's own people in 1987-8.

Are Barack Obama, John Kerry, and their regime friends really that stupid — or do they think we are?

UPDATE:
Headline: Harry Reid Forced Obama To Scrap Meeting With GOP Leaders On Averting Government Shutdown…
Story:When the president considered sitting down with the four congressional leaders in the White House ahead of the deadline to avert a government shutdown, Reid privately urged Obama to call off the meeting, according to several people familiar with the situation. Reid believed that it would amount to nothing more than a photo-op that would give the false impression that a serious negotiation was occurring, even warning he wouldn’t attend such a session. Obama scrapped it. [emphasis added]
Result: Barack Obama and Harry Reid confirm again they are not willing to negotiate. They do not want an agreement. They want a shutdown. Their concept is "Let's compromise — do it my way!" They're just two little dictators.

Obamacare is the Law Just Accept It

President Barack Obama says the horribly misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (more generally knows as Obamacare) is the law of the land and everyone — especially the law's opponents — should "just accept it."

That made me think of this, which is exactly as logical.

Obama partisan Senat Majority Leader Harry Reid goes further. He apparently believes there has never been a bad law, and no bad law has ever had to be overturned. (Or, at least, that's what he says.) To paraphrase Reid only very slightly,

This cartoon doesn't say it but, thanks to the Democrats, lynching was also supported by the law until the 1960s.

Are these people really that dumb? Or do they think we are?

It seems to me this kind of "argument" is disingenuous, and is intended by these individuals only to intimidate and deceive.