How 'bout that Obamacare?

happy jack wrote:

edge540 wrote:

Should "King Barry" force and tell the insurance companies to not alter or change their plans so people can still keep their crappy healthcare plans?...eh?

"King Barry" should not be dictating to insurance companies, nor to any privately-owned businesses, what may or may not be offered to their customers, so long as the product or service is legal.

Ah well then you & I agree, the insurance companies must follow the law which of course is The Affordable Care Act.
Right?
So jack, are you one of those "unsuspecting Americans"?

happy jack wrote:

edge540 wrote:

happy jack wrote:

edge540 wrote:

Should "King Barry" force and tell the insurance companies to not alter or change their plans so people can still keep their crappy healthcare plans?...eh?

"King Barry" should not be dictating to insurance companies, nor to any privately-owned businesses, what may or may not be offered to their customers, so long as the product or service is legal.

Ah well then you & I agree, the insurance companies must follow the law which of course is The Affordable Care Act.
Right?
So jack, are you one of those "unsuspecting Americans"?

No, we don’t agree, Einstein.

What, you're telling me that the insurance companies don't have follow the law which of course is The Affordable Care Act?

Quote :

The whole point of the controversy is that Lyin’ King Barry took something from the American people, something that had been perfectly legal and legitimate for decades, and decreed, ex post facto, that it no longer was.[/b]

No he did not take anything away so stop lying, the insurance companies changed their plans not the president. They did the taking away.

Quote :

And no, I am not one of those “unsuspecting Americans”. I suspected from the beginning that Obamacare was going to suck the big one.

It hasn't started yet genius, so what you "suspected from the beginning" is made up Fox News-GOP bullshit lies and propaganda.

Good to know you don't have a crappy healthcare insurance policy.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/fairy-tale-continues-obama-proposes-extralegal-obamacare-fix_767089.html

'Fairy Tale' Continues as Obama Proposes Extralegal Obamacare Fix

12:12 PM, Nov 14, 2013 • By DANIEL HALPER

Earlier this week, former President Bill Clinton advised President Obama to "honor the commitment" he made and to allow Americans to keep their health care plans, if they like them. That was a central promise Obama made when he sold Obamacare, but one that turned out not to be true when Obamacare began to be implemented last month.
"So I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got," Clinton in an interview released Tuesday.
Now President Obama is taking Clinton's advice and trying to honor that commitment. In remarks today at the White House today, Obama said, "I completely get how upsetting this can be" lose insurance plans that I promised Americans would be able to keep. "To those Americans, I hear you loud and clear."
But there's a catch with president's proposed solution. The president is not proposing that the law be changed to allow all health insurance plans grandfathered into Obamacare's eligibility requirements.
No, instead the White House is saying that it will use "enforcement discretion" to allow illegal health insurance plans to be able to still be sold. That is, the Obama administration will not enforce the penalty on individuals for not having eligible health insurance plans and they'll allow the insurance companies to still sell so-called bad plans -- plans they technically can't sell under Obamacare.
"Under the White House’s approach, the Department of Health and Human Services will notify the nation’s state insurance commissioners that they have federal permission to allow consumers who already have such insurance policies to keep them through 2014," reports the Washington Post.
He'll also be forcing insurance companies to help advertise for Obamacare by letting customers know that there's an Obamacare marketplace where they can purchase (or get subsidized) health care coverage.
Obama's proposal is an extra-legal solution to a big problem for millions of Americans around the country.
"I don't see within the law how they can do this administratively," said Speaker John Boehner in a press conference on Capitol Hill. "No one can identify anything the president could do administratively to keep his pledge that would be both legal and effective."



Let me see if I have this right - Obama creates a law, a law which He lied about from the get-go, then decides that He is allowed to break that law. And to put the icing on the cake, He will be forcing his competitors to advertise His product.
Hail Caesar.

happy jack wrote:

Let me see if I have this right - Obama creates a law...

Holy crap, I didn't know a president can create a law. Where is that in the constitution, jack?

Quote :

He lied about from the get-go...

No he didn't. Tell us jack, did the president force or tell the insurance companies to change their plans?

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/obamas-health-care-promise/?ref=opinion&_r=0

November 14, 2013, 2:40 pm

Obama’s Health Care Promise

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

There are important questions about whether the fix President Obama offered today for Americans whose insurance policies were cancelled will help them, whether it will hinder the broad goals of the health insurance reform law, and whether it will satisfy the opponents of reform.  We will start to address them later on the editorial page.
But this was also one of those moments when a nation takes stock of its president. And it seemed worth nothing here that Mr. Obama has dealt another blow to his own already damaged credibility with this latest reminder of how he and his team bungled the rollout of health care reform..
Hovering over the press conference at the White House today was the question of whether Mr. Obama lied — whether he deliberately said what he knew not to be true with the intention of deceiving people — when he said repeatedly that Americans who like their policies would be able to keep them.
“There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate,” Mr. Obama said today.
He said he was thinking of the 95 percent of insured Americans who are covered by group insurance provided by employers, unions, Medicare or Medicaid. He also said he believed that a “grandfather clause” would cover those in the remaining 5 percent who wanted to hang onto current policies even if they were not as good as what is available on the new exchanges.
Those explanations are not likely to be terribly persuasive even to those who liked Mr. Obama and supported health care, but have come to doubt him. His political enemies will scoff at them.
I have seen no proof that Mr. Obama knew the details of the grandfather clause when he made his famous promise. But there had to be many, many people in his administration who did know the details. They could have, and should have, told the president that what he was saying was flat wrong – that the grandfather clause would not deliver on his broadly drawn promise.
In order to be covered, you had to have a policy that you bought before the law was signed in 2010 and was still in effect without significant changes at the end of 2013 — no major change in premiums, co-pays or coverage. How likely is that in the volatile world of individual health insurance, where policies last for a year and are subject to change at the whim of insurance companies?
On one level, it should surprise no one that a politician faced with either seeming like a liar or seeming like a fool would choose the fool. But that still leaves us with the disturbing impression — and not for the first time in this administration — that Mr. Obama sometimes shoots from the hip, that he is still struggling to handle the politics of the presidency after nearly five years in office, and that he is surrounded by people who are too incompetent or too weak to help him.



Et tu, New York Times?
And today is not even the Ides of March, is it?

edge540 wrote:

happy jack wrote:

And no, I am not one of those “unsuspecting Americans”. I suspected from the beginning that Obamacare was going to suck the big one.[/b]

It hasn't started yet genius, so what you "suspected from the beginning" is made up Fox News-GOP bullshit lies and propaganda.

An "intellectually lazy" slug "suspected from the beginning".  Anyone buying that?

Artie60438 wrote:

edge540 wrote:

happy jack wrote:

And no, I am not one of those “unsuspecting Americans”. I suspected from the beginning that Obamacare was going to suck the big one.[/b]

It hasn't started yet genius, so what you "suspected from the beginning" is made up Fox News-GOP bullshit lies and propaganda.

An "intellectually lazy" slug "suspected from the beginning".  Anyone buying that?

Of course we're also supposed to buy that conservatives like jack, the GOP and the clowns on Fake News really give a shit about those three percent who have shitty policies, who eventually have to get policies that meet the minimum standards of the ACA.

happy jack wrote:

And to put the icing on the cake, He will be forcing his competitors to advertise His product.
Hail Caesar.

WTF?  Competitors? "His" product?  It's glaringly obvious that you don't even have a rudimentary understanding of the Affordable Care Act.

There is no "public option." The plans offered on the Exchanges are offered by the same insurance companies, not the government.  It's beyond ludicrous to state that those same insurance companies are advertising for "competitors."

Where the hell have you been the last few years?

Scorpion wrote:

Where the hell have you been the last few years?

Watching Fox News, apparently.

And of course the rollout was shit.  The one thing Republicans made damn sure of was that the entire process wasn't funded.  They got a fraction of what was requested in their proposal to design and implement the website and database, and that number was based on the states creating their own exchanges, instead of the red states throwing their tantrums like they did.  HHS was forced to take money from other departments to put together what they did.  So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it was a less than flawless execution.

I just heard it on the radio.  I think Jack's now whining about the proposed fix for the "if you like it, you can keep it" problem.  They're working on extending those grandfathered plans, forcing the insurance companies to do two things - explicitly state what the plans don't cover and what safeguards they don't have, as well as listing what's on the exchange.  From what I understood; I'll try and dig up some links later.

But, yeah...  Still pretty low on my "Give a Fuck" meter.

I wrote:

And of course the rollout was shit.  The one thing Republicans made damn sure of was that the entire process wasn't funded.  They got a fraction of what was requested in their proposal to design and implement the website and database, and that number was based on the states creating their own exchanges, instead of the red states throwing their tantrums like they did.  HHS was forced to take money from other departments to put together what they did.  So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it was a less than flawless execution.

The Obamacare sabotage campaign

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Most Republican governors declined to create their own state insurance exchanges — an option inserted in the bill in the Senate to appeal to the classic conservative preference for local control — forcing the federal government to take at least partial responsibility for creating marketplaces serving 36 states — far more than ever intended.

Then congressional Republicans refused repeatedly to appropriate dedicated funds to do all that extra work, leaving the Health and Human Services Department and other agencies to cobble together HealthCare.gov by redirecting funds from existing programs. On top of that, nearly half of the states declined to expand their Medicaid programs using federal funds, as the law envisioned.

. . .

Then, in the months leading up to the program’s debut, some states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law. And congressional Republicans sent so many burdensome queries to local hospitals and nonprofits gearing up to help consumers navigate the new system face-to-face that at least two such groups returned their federal grants and gave up the effort. When the White House let it be known last summer that it was in talks with the National Football League to enlist star athletes to help promote the law, the Senate’s top two Republicans sent the league an ominous letter wondering why it would “risk damaging its inclusive and apolitical brand.” The NFL backed off.

The drama culminated on the eve of the open enrollment date of Oct. 1. Congressional Republicans shut down the government, disrupting last-minute planning and limiting the administration’s political ability to prepare the public for the likelihood of potential problems, because it was in a last-ditch fight to defend the president’s biggest legislative accomplishment.

. . .

In fact, putting an excessive burden on the federal government was the explicit aim of the law’s opponents. “Congress authorized no funds for federal ‘fallback’ exchanges,” the Tea Party Patriots website noted as long ago as last December. “So Washington may not be able to impose exchanges on states at all.” The group went on to suggest that since Washington was not equipped to handle so many state exchanges, “both financially and otherwise — this means the entire law could implode on itself.”

That same month, the conservative pollster and pundit Dick Morris urged visitors to his website to sign petitions asking their states to refuse to establish exchanges. “If states assume the responsibility for administering this nightmare,” he warned, “the blame will not land on the president’s doorstep.”

happy jack wrote:

The fact that there was opposition to Obamacare comes as some sort of surprise to you?

No it does not.
If Barry had found a cure for all cancer and eliminated all poverty there there would opposition from the GOP, Fox News and deranged Obama haters.

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Obamacare proponents would be best served if they stopped blaming others, stopped acting like drama queens, and channeled their energies into fixing the clusterfuck that they created, and that they alone own.

I don't understand, how can something that has not yet been implemented and started yet be a clusterfuck?

happy jack wrote:

The fact that there was opposition to Obamacare comes as some sort of surprise to you?

Of course not.
If Barry had found a cure for all cancer and eliminated all poverty there would be howling opposition from the GOP, Fox News and demented Obama haters.

Quote :

Obamacare proponents would be best served if they stopped blaming others, stopped acting like drama queens, and channeled their energies into fixing the clusterfuck that they created, and that they alone own.

I don't understand, how can something that has not yet been implemented and started yet be a clusterfuck?

happy jack wrote:

The fact that there was opposition to Obamacare comes as some sort of surprise to you?

No, and neither was the outright sabotage. I pointed it out because Republicans like you seem to think the problems with the rollout have nothing to the do with the deliberate interference from the GOP, despite the evidence to the contrary.

happy jack wrote:

Whiny - that's the word I was looking for.

Don't care.  It's no less true.

happy jack wrote:

Funding, or the lack thereof, should have been addressed before the disastrous rollout, not during

It was addressed before.  They asked for the money they projected; Republicans said "no, do it with 1/10th".  The rollout was the result, and they were only able to get that much done after cannibalizing funds from other departments.  

happy jack wrote:

...not to be confused with your phantom "outright sabotage".

The definition for sabotage is pretty clear and quite different from opposition.  The Republican interference in the ACA is long and very well documented by the GOP itself since they think it made them heroes.  So unless any of that is in dispute, it's pretty obvious the shoe fits.

happy jack wrote:

edge540 wrote:

 
If Barry had found a cure for all cancer and eliminated all poverty ....

He has, however, found a way to fuck with the lives of a few million Americans, which is the issue here.

You mean as opposed to republicans fucking with the lives of 48 million Americans by denying them affordable healthcare....eh?

Quote :

Better Dead and Red: How the GOP blocked health care for red state Americans

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/29/1241710/-Better-Dead-and-Red-How-the-GOP-blocked-health-care-for-red-state-Americans#

edge540 wrote:

happy jack wrote:

edge540 wrote:

 
If Barry had found a cure for all cancer and eliminated all poverty ....

He has, however, found a way to fuck with the lives of a few million Americans, which is the issue here.

You mean as opposed to republicans fucking with the lives of 48 million Americans by denying them affordable healthcare....eh?

The Obamacare Cancellation Notices You Haven’t Heard About

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The problem plaguing recipients of cancellation notices is even less severe than the graphic above would suggest. Nationally, approximately 15 million people are purchasing individual plans, but just 5 million remain in those plans for a year or more — the majority switch to more comprehensive insurance.

Some percentage of these five million enrollees will be able to stay in their cancelled policies for longer, as state insurance commissioners and insurers adopt the Obama administration’s new flexibility rule, allowing existing plans to continue offering coverage for at least a year. But even the millions who do have to enroll in new policies in 2014 will do so with the aid of a tax credit and will pay less or a comparable price for more comprehensive coverage. Approximately 48 percent “of people now buying their own insurance would be eligible for a tax credit that would offset their premium,” Kaiser estimates. More than one million “will be eligible for Medicaid starting in 2014.” That leaves 2.1 million to 2.4 million Americans who are too wealthy to qualify for assistance and will have to pay more for insurance under the new system.

Compare that to the 5 million Americans who fall into the coverage gap. They are the working poor cashiers, cooks, nurses’ aides, waiters and waitresses who were intended to benefit the most under reform, yet will continue to struggle to afford coverage as a result of the GOP’s political calculations. “Blacks are disproportionately affected,” the New York Times recently reported, “largely because more of them are poor and living in Southern states. In all, 6 out of 10 blacks live in the states not expanding Medicaid.”

Yet the very same Republican lawmakers and conservative advocacy groups who have seized on the cancellation notices to argue that the law has failed are actively campaigning to prevent states from expanding public health insurance to these people. They claim that expansion would cost states millions, even though the federal government will pick up nearly all of the costs of coverage (100 percent for the first three years, phasing down to 90 percent in 2020 and all subsequent years), paying nearly 93 percent the cost over the next nine years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

happy jack wrote:

Rational, responsible people do not buy a house or a car when they know they will in no way be able to make the monthly payments.

And if implementing laws (especially legislation as complicated as the ACA) worked anything at all like buying a house or car, you might have a point.

Too bad for you that it doesn't.

happy jack wrote:

If they knew that they were bound to be short on funds, they should have never proceeded with the clusterfuck. . . Please place the blame where it actually lies – on those who went forward with something they knew they would be unable to finance.

Well, at least we can agree it was sabotage.  It's just the administration's fault for not expecting it.