Allow me to summarize the latest chapters of this great foray into Government Nannyism: Every winning Republican senatorial candidate campaigned on the idea of repealing the health-care law — not refining, amending, or improving, but repealing. The Supreme Court will hear a case that even the law’s supporters call an “existential threat.” In the case of King v. Burwell, If the Court rules against the administration, not only will it mean an end to subsidies in 37 states, it will also effectively kill the employer mandate and the individual mandate in those states. Jonathan Gruber, considered one of the architects of Obamacare has admitted that Obamacare advocates had deliberately misled the public in order to get the law passed. Gruber compounded his truth-telling by suggesting that such deception was necessary because American voters were too “stupid” to understand how good the law was for them. HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell was forced to admit that far fewer people are likely to sign up for insurance by the end of 2015 than previously expected. The lower enrollment is obviously a political embarrassment. After all, the raison d’être for the law, with all its costs and disruptions, was to expand health-insurance coverage. Now it appears that not only will Obamacare fall even farther short of “universal coverage” than previously expected, it will end up covering fewer people than free-market alternatives. Saturday marks the start of the program’s second open-enrollment period. Burwell admits that she predicts ongoing problems: “We will have things that won’t go right. We will have outages, we will have downtime.” When you consider that testing has not even been completed on some aspects of the revised website, and that the administration expects a greater daily usage than last year (the enrollment period is only half as long, for one thing), horror stories are inevitable. And all of this comes on top of recent news that more people are losing the plans they have been enrolled in, premiums in the most popular plans are rising an average of 8.4 percent next year, and the health-care law will probably cost more than expected and add as much as $131 billion to the deficit by 2024. Not even the world’s biggest optimist could find a silver lining in this dark cloud. Since Buddy Wright has blocked me for taking him to the woodshed on this issue the other night, someone will have to forward this to him.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 17:36:01 +0000
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