Sleepless in Midland

Obama then -- You didn't build that. Obama now -- I didn't build that.

President Obama didn't waste any time distancing himself from the way Obamacare was sold. Obama told Fox News' Ed Henry that, "I just heard about this," when asked about Gruber's remarks that they lied about Obamacare to get the rabble on board with it. Source: Breitbart.com.

President Obama's fingerprints are all over it, and the only thing plausible about him and all the lies is that he probably lost count of how many lies he/they told.

Meanwhile, conservatives' favorite liberal, Juan Williams, gets quoted about Gruber at Mediaite.com:

“I would say it’s much ado about nothing with Gruber, except that the critics of Obamacare are having a field day.”

Williams rationalized:

Williams insisted that all laws require some sort of clever packaging much like how corporations market products.

No. It isn't the same thing at all.. A corporation using fraudulent tactics to market products get sued up the ying yang by their competitors, federal agencies, and customers. The free market keeps them honest. With Obamacare we're stuck with it unless the government itself changes it.

Revealing disclosure from Obamacare architect - keep the people uninformed

Much has been made of the "uninformed voters" whose lack of information leads them to vote for the candidate promising them the most. But something that wasn't so obvious was the deliberate effort to keep them uninformed.

Patrick Howley at Dailycaller.com provides some revealing tactics regarding the sale of Obamacare to the people. See Obamacare Architect: Lack of Transparency Was Key Because ‘Stupidity Of The American Voter’ Would Have Killed Obamacare. Technical advisor to Obama on Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, let the cat out of the bag. Here's Howley quoting Guber:

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that.  In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

Those misguided people who want socialism in the U.S. have calculated that the ends justify the means. Forcing it on an unwilling population requires deception.

Swiss voted down switch to gov health insurance

The Obama admin was in a big rush to copy European mandatory health insurance programs, but apparently it wasn't as easy as it looked.

Switzerland is supposed to have a system on which Obamacare was modeled. It requires that each resident purchase medical care insurance from one of 61 companies. Source. That's a lot of choices, much more than in the U.S.

Anyway, just like everywhere else, their medical prices are going up. So along came some geniuses who proposed a government takeover. But unlike in the U.S., the citizens got to vote on it. They voted it down. See Swiss reject switch from private to state health insurance. Here are some select quotes from that article.

Geneva (AFP) - Swiss voters on Sunday rejected a plan for a seismic shift from the country's all-private health insurance system to a state-run scheme.

Referendum results showed that almost 62 percent of voters had shot down a reform pushed by left-leaning parties which say the current private system is busting the budgets of ordinary residents.

This next part is interesting:

The results also underlined the national divisions over the hotly-contested issue as the country's German-speaking regions voted against the plan, while their French-speaking counterparts were in favour.

Maybe they saw how Medicare or the Veterans Administration are working in the U.S.

Why so many part time workers? Obamacare.

Have we reached the tipping point at which a majority of the electorate wants to raid the treasury? Or is there still enough of a can-do streak in us that we would rather make it on our own?

The government certainly isn't making it easy for that latter group, and one obvious example is the growth of part time jobs due to government policies that discourages the hiring of full time workers. We were warned of this before Obamacare became the law of the land, so it shouldn't come as a surprise.

Ellyn Terry of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta points out that full time employment fell during the recession while part time employment rose. "Today, there are about 12 percent more people working part-time than before the recession and about 2 percent fewer people working full-time hours," she says. However, that disparity isn't likely to change soon. Why? “Full-time employee compensation costs have increased relative to those of part time employees.” Thanks, Obamacare.

(Link via James Pethokoukis.)

Are we helpless to do anything about this? About all we can hope for is that Obama's hand picked successor or her rival in the Democrat Party don't take over the White House in 2017. Then maybe, just maybe, there will be an opportunity to repeal Obamacare and put in place a few simple fixes to eliminate the insurance caps and get insurance for those uninsured who actually want insurance. After all, those two problems were allegedly the reasons for upending the entire American health care system.

Obamacare proponents are hoping they can do as well as the Veterans Administration

The VA was once held up as an example of what government provided healthcare could be. And it probably is a good example. So Obamacare proponents are probably going to double down on fixing the VA problems, although the doctor shortage will be a little bit harder to cure than a shortage of gurneys. (Psst. Ask a Medicare patient about doctor shortages.)

Mark Steyn made the prediction years ago that under a U.S. government healthcare plan citizens would fare no better than they do under the British healthcare plan. The BBC would report on some outrageous outcome directly attributable to accidental or deliberate neglect. The people would react appropriately. But the furor would subside, and then the BBC would provide news reports featuring people who had favorable outcomes and very flattering things to say about the healthcare system. And the underlying problems aren't fixed.  Mr. Steyn said we in the U.S. should anticipate that same thing here.

If he's right, expect to see the msm reporting in the near future about instances in which the VA did an absolutely fantastic job on a patient. We will be expected to judge them by what they did right, not by what they did wrong.

Meanwhile, one of the lessons Obamacare proponents have learned from the VA affair is that they need to be careful about hiding unfavorable numbers. But they already knew that.

Related: Daniel J. Mitchell says some similar things only better at Unofficial Death Panels at the VA Show Where Obamacare Will Lead.

Left overjoyed at Census change

That's the reverse headline from what actually appeared at Politico.com: Right outraged at Census change.

Maybe the changes that the White House made to the census really were overdue and the clouding of the before Obamacare and after Obamacare data was a mere coincidence. But this administration has demonstrated time and again that if there's a choice between doing the right thing and making themselves look good, the latter prevails at every opportunity.

Anyway, the Politico headline was very administration friendly. Elect a Republican president and watch the main stream media turn into a watch dog media overnight.

PBA -- uncontrollable laughter

This strange commercial crossed the screen while I was waiting for The Simpsons to come on last night. They were selling a drug, and the customer base apparently consists of people who have bouts of uncontrollable laughter. The malady is called PBA, they said, and there was a URL for PBAfacts that appeared in the commercial. (No hyperlink here. Their "Web Site Linking Policy" says linking to the site constitutes an agreement to the terms and conditions therein. I was struck with uncontrollable laughter.)

Anyway, the affliction may be real, and if so, knowing about it is a blessing. Anytime you laugh at someone inappropriately, there's a built in excuse. "I'm sorry, I must have PBA." If they protest, say, "Hey, I'm the victim here!"

As a last resort curse and claim Tourette syndrome.

So the Point of ObamaCare was to kill the insurance industry

One of the architects of Obamacare, Ezekiel Emanuel, has been busy writing articles touting his new book, and Robert Tracinski has done the dirty work of reading them and giving us a nice summation in What Was the Point of ObamaCare?. (Found at Betsy's Page.) Here's the answer:

Emanuel gives us one big answer to our question. What was the point of ObamaCare, if not to insure the uninsured? To destroy the insurance companies. ...

What is going to replace private health insurance, he says, is something called “accountable care organizations” or ACOs, about which he makes some very glowing and optimistic predictions, which are easy to make because “This health delivery structure is in its infancy,” so nothing has had a chance to go wrong yet.

The ACOs actually sound pretty much like a new and expanded version of the olds HMOs: an insurance company wedded to a network of preferred doctors and hospitals. And of course it will have many of the same problems.

Barack Obama told us early on that he intended to fundamentally change America as we knew it. Left unsaid was that the change would probably hurt more people than it helped. But what's amazing is that so many people voted for him not once but twice.

Another Obamacare lie exposed -- turns out even the uninsured don't like it

This ranks right up there with "If you like your plan you can keep your plan," although that one was merely intended to help us swallow it. This one was intended to get us to bite. One of the main purposes of Obamacare, we were told, was to get insurance coverage for all those people who didn't have it.

Never mind that many states had their own programs for allowing the uninsurable to get insurance. Texas, for example, has had one for several years. (I've wondered why it got so little attention. Maybe it's because they don't issue press releases, and reporters too busy Googling Kim Kardashian never learned about it.)

Anyway, all the clues are pointing to a miserably low number of uninsured people enrolling in Obamacare. The very people Obamacare proponents said they wanted to help don't want their help. We have to piece this together because Health and Human Services won't tell us how many of the uninsured they are insuring. Mary Katherine Hamm nails it in HHS: Why, no, we are not measuring the very metric ObamaCare was passed to improve. Excerpt:

The federal government is not even measuring the very number ObamaCare was created to bring down. How many times did we hear 47 million uninsured? How many times did we hear it was necessary to pass a huge revamp of the entire system to insure them? Later we heard the prediction for how many of those 47 million we’ll actually insure is quite underwhelming. Now, we ask: Hey, how many of the uninsured are we actually insuring?

A: “That’s not a data point we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.”

There is no clearer dereliction of duty for this law. They created an irresponsible reform behemoth, they failed to implement it responsibly, they spent irresponsible amounts of money building a bunch of exchanges that don’t work, and now they’re not even responsible enough to bother checking how much help or damage they’ve done with the most straightforward metric available.

Helping the uninsured was something they hoped would happen. But it seems clear that the real goal was to place a vital industry under the government thumb.

Added: Yeah, calling it a "lie" was a little bit of hyperbole. But that's what the left did with George W. Bush when he relied on the available intelligence to contend Saddam Hussein had more weapons of mass destruction than were ultimately found. So we're playing by Alinsky's rules now.

Unintended consequences -- Obamacare med devices tax kills jobs

The Advanced Medical Technology Association released a survey on 02/19/2014 titled Impact of the Medical Device Excise Tax which showed some interesting results, unintended though they may be. Via WashingtonTimes.com.

Some of the key findings:

JOB LOSS
The tax has resulted in employment reductions of approximately 14,000 industry workers and forgone hiring of 19,000 workers. The total job impact of the tax on industry employment was approximately 33,000.

Independent estimates of the relationship between direct employment in the industry and indirect employment among suppliers and in the general economy found a ratio of four indirect jobs for each direct job.1

Applying this ratio to jobs lost or foregone suggests that the impact of the tax on indirect employment would be approximately 132,000 jobs, for a total job loss due to the tax of as many as 165,000 jobs.

REDUCED R&D
Almost one-third of respondents (30.6%) said they had reduced R&D as the result of the tax.

MOVED JOBS ABROAD
Almost 10 percent of respondents said they had relocated manufacturing outside of the U.S. or expanded manufacturing abroad rather than in the U.S. because of the tax.

OTHER NEGATIVE IMPACTS
Three-quarters of respondents said they had taken one or more of the following actions in response to the tax: deferred or cancelled capital investments; deferred or cancelled plans to open new facilities; reduced investment in start-up companies; found it more difficult to raise capital (among start-up companies); reduced or deferred increases in employee compensation.

FUTURE IMPACTS
While the focus of the survey was on effects of the tax in its first year, several questions were future-oriented and suggest that the tax will have additional negative impacts over time if not repealed.

58% of respondents said they would consider reducing employment if the device tax were not repealed.

50% said they would consider reducing R&D investment if the device tax were not repealed.

There was one aspect of these survey results that could have had a bearing on how the questions were answered: "Sixty percent of the respondents were currently operating at a profit, while 40% were not." A company in the red may be planning on cutbacks anyway.

Nevertheless, logic tells us that any company facing a tax on its products will make adjustments to compensate for the expense of that tax, whether it be raising prices if the marketplace will allow it, or cutting costs elsewhere.

Fortunately for the human race, this Obamacare tax only affects American companies. The creative powerhouses elsewhere may take up the slack. President Obama has always seemed uneasy with America's role as world leader, and here's one area which might provide him some comfort.

IRS got taken for billions in fraudulent refund claims -- and they're going to be involved in Obamacare?

First the good news: The IRS paid out $1.6 billion less in fraudulent refunds in 2012 than in 2011. The bad news is that in 2012 it was still $3.6 billion. For purposes of this blog post, "fraudulent refunds" refers to tax refunds to people using stolen social security numbers.

(I had my own experience with this when I tried to file my 2011 return online only to find out someone else had already filed one seeking a refund to me in another city. I have a sneaking suspicion that they paid it even though I reported it in plenty of time to stop it.)

It appears to be quite easy for thieves to buy someone's most personal information. Now that each of our medical histories is going into some healthcare provider's database which will be shared with who knows whom, it won't be long before it's all available for purchase.

So far Obamacare has been a miserable failure, and only the most loyal Obamaphile would try to deny that. Maybe it will get better. Or maybe Republicans can repeal it.

But the IRS is a troubled agency. They've used their power to thwart political opposition to Obama. And they've paid out way too much money to ID thieves. And now they are requiring businesses to swear Obamacare doesn't affect their staffing decisions. If we didn't know it before, we certainly know now that getting them into the business of our medical insurance was a very bad idea.

Obamacare doesn't require government to notify citizens if their identities get stolen

This seems like a fairly major flaw, although it's only one of many problems currently obvious about the partisan Obamacare law. No one is required to tell the Obamacare customers if their personal information gets leaked, hacked or misappropriated.

With the news over the Christmas holiday that Target got hacked, the news that Neiman Marcus got hacked, and the warnings that there may have been other retailers hacked, anyone who has used a credit card, the internet, or both at the same time is probably a little bit uneasy. The bad guys seem to be able to hack anything.

Then there's Obamacare which is looking worse every day. Not only does the website have some security flaws, the geniuses who crafted the law apparently didn't know that computer systems could be hacked and neglected to put in a requirement that any customer whose personal information got stolen be notified.

Fortunately, the House of Representatives, which in the eyes of the main stream media is full of evil obstructionists, has passed a bill remedying that. See H.R. 3811:

Not later than two business days after the discovery of a breach of security of any system maintained by an Exchange established under section 1311 or 1321 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (42 U.S.C. 18031, 18041) which is known to have resulted in personally identifiable information of an individual being stolen or unlawfully accessed, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide notice of such breach to each such individual.

Every Republican who voted voted for it. But 122 obstructionist Democrats voted against it. Apparently, Democrat party leaders were afraid it might give Republicans ammo to make Obamacare look bad -- the same reason President Obama didn't delay the disastrous Obamacare roll out.

We'll see what the Senate does with it. And if they pass it, Obama will have the opportunity to try to convince us that we don't need the law because his administration is so trustworthy we could rely on them to notify victims without their being forced to do it.