Town Hall – by David LimbaughIf you have just returned from a space mission on a spaceship without Internet access and some Kool-Aid-drinking liberal has assured you the disastrous Obamacare problems are behind us, let me do my part to help deprogram you.
The website problems were too numerous to count, and they are just the tip of the Obamacare iceberg. The substantive problems with Obamacare are enormous. Oh, and the website problems continue, as well.
Obama is not about to abandon this law, because he cares more about fundamentally transforming the nation than he even does about his approval ratings, which have reached an all-time low. Besides, if he’s lost the public’s trust, it’s not his fault but ours, because, to paraphrase Valerie Jarrett, we are just not quite capable of fathoming his surpassing greatness, and we’ll eventually recover our senses.
As a returning cloistered astronaut who has just emerged from his propaganda session with the Obamabot, you should hear some highlights about Obamacare from just the past few days’ news.
The Obamacare website has reportedly violated the Federal Information Security Management Act by failing to perform a series of security control assessment tests.
The Department of Health and Human Services reports that just 365,000 people have signed up for private health insurance under the new law, which is abysmally far from its already meager goal of signing 1.2 million by the end of November. Most of these came from the 14 state exchanges, and only 137,000 came from the federal website, HealthCare.gov. As some 5 million have already lost coverage because of Obamacare, it’s hard to imagine how the law won’t result in millions more people losing their coverage than new people acquiring it, even counting the 800,000 new Medicaid enrollees. All the while, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius falsely assures Congress that everything’s fine, saying, “We are seeing very, very positive trends” now that HealthCare.gov is supposedly working better.
Some who have signed up for coverage on the website are receiving email notices informing them they shouldn’t assume they are covered unless they “have seen the Confirmation Letter from the Disbursing Office!”
Indeed, according to insurance industry consultants, those who have signed up for coverage may find that their coverage has lapsed because to secure coverage, a customer’s premiums first must be paid. Reportedly, only 5 percent of Obamacare enrollees have paid at this point.
The Washington Post reports that patients with high medical bills are having difficulties determining which plans on the exchange fit their particular needs. In the website chaos, this information is far from readily obtainable.
Reuters cites a Cornell University study showing that just half of the country’s psychiatrists are likely to accept Obamacare.
Only 7,000 people in Illinois have signed up for Obamacare. In Missouri, the scorched-earth law may cause major cuts in hours for substitute teachers and a potential fine of $150,000 for public schools.
A little-known regulation from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services may cause as many as 3.5 million poor and elderly people to lose home health care coverage beginning Jan. 1.
It’s now common knowledge that Obamacare exchanges are excluding many physicians, hospitals and drugs, and a panel of doctors will testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that they are being dropped from patient provider networks because of Obamacare.
Sebelius refuses to provide straight answers to questions about whether and how often she met with President Obama about Obamacare and the website prior to the rollout.
Adding insult to injury, HHS is obstructing a congressional investigation by instructing contractors working on the website not to release documents to the investigators.
While we are treating Obama’s fraudulent promises on Obamacare as past-tense deceit, we may be overlooking his ongoing duplicity. As The Wall Street Journal’s editors also observe, “the reason for all this obstruction and statistical juking is so the White House can get the press corps and Democrats to believe that the worst is over and that ObamaCare is now rolling toward success. … But it’s impossible for an outsider to know what the truth really is because HHS and the White House continue to manipulate and bury the real statistics.”
There’s one other thing I want you space travelers to understand before we end this session. Our indignation over Obama’s lies about our ability to keep our plans and doctors is wholly justified, but let’s not overlook another consequence of this betrayal beyond the government’s outrageous severance of our freedoms and personal relationships with our health care providers. Obamacare’s exclusion of doctors and hospitals from the exchanges necessarily means a reduction in the quality of health care overall, thus negating one of the main ostensible purposes of this abominable law in the first place.
Next time you decide to go on a space mission, demand Web access and give me your email address.
“Don’t Be Fooled: Obamacare Is Not Getting Better; It’s Not Fixable” ???
It was never SUPPOSED to be fixable.