Obamacare 'Fix' Could Turn Insurance Marketplace into Chaos

President Barack Obama’s latest decision to back-pedal on individual health plans — allowing insurers to extend existing policies to consumers for one year — could drive the marketplace into pandemonium, resulting in the very legislation intended to improve national healthcare being its impetus to fail, The Hill reported Friday.

"Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers," said Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the nation’s largest trade group for insurance companies.

"Premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption of when consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace. If due to these changes fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the exchange, premiums will increase in the marketplace and there will be fewer choices for consumers."

Ignagni also said her organization strongly opposes legislation, which some lawmakers are pushing, that would allow consumers to keep existing plans, saying it "would provoke an administrative fiasco and could have serious implications for the new marketplace’s pool, premium prices and the cost of the law to the federal government," The Hill reported.

The newspaper also noted a report online by Forbes magazine saying the president’s proposed fix may just delay the inevitable for consumers. 

"It’s not clear whether insurance companies will actually renew plans they have already cancelled, and many may still feel they need to cancel plans because the Affordable Care Act fundamentally changes the dynamics of the individual insurance market,” Forbes staffer Matthew Herper wrote. "The fix also makes no promises about next year. The Administration will get to decide whether to agree to allow these plans to be continued again. So it’s not like the plans are being officially grandfathered."

Via: Newsmax

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The Town FEMA Turned Down The tide goes out on religious liberty

When Sandy swept across the Jersey shore in October 2012, the coastal town of Ocean Grove was spared the worst. Sure, half the town’s boardwalk was destroyed and its pier was swept out to sea. And yes, sand, trees, and concrete benches were carried two blocks inland, while entire buildings were picked up and moved across town. But Ocean Grove’s crown jewel, an ornate and beautiful 6,250-seat auditorium, built in 1894, survived. It only had a third of its roof torn off. The auditorium’s foundation was intact and, most important, its 11,561-pipe organ was unscathed by the wind and rain.

CORBIS/ AP WAYNE PARRY / NEWSCOM

So despite everything, the residents of Ocean Grove counted themselves lucky. That is, until they had to deal with the federal government. Ocean Grove has been denied rebuilding funds from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In one sense, this denial is part of the Obama administration’s quiet campaign against religion in the public square. Yet the story of FEMA’s conflict with Ocean Grove is about more than just Barack Obama. It’s the story of modern America’s rebellion against its religious foundations, rendered in miniature.

In the late 1860s, a Methodist preacher named William Osborn assembled a small group of pastors from around Philadelphia to purchase a patch of land at the shore in central New Jersey. On July 31, 1869, they christened their one square mile of paradise “Ocean Grove.”  

Via: Weekly Standard

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Report: Feds spent $4.4 BILLION on state Obamacare exchanges

Data compiled and released Friday by the conservative organization Americans for Tax Reform reveals the amount of federal tax dollars funneled to states to implement Obamacare exchanges at $4.4 billion.

According to ATR, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services distributed the funds to states for a variety of “vague” purposes.

ATR pulled out grant purposes such as:

• “[P]reparations to demonstrate operational readiness”
• “Provide assistance to hire staff and consultants”
• “Continue and complete current planning and implementation efforts”
• “Secure staff consultants and expert resources and actively engage stakeholders”
• “Marketplace IT system design and development costs including IT consultants and privacy and security consultants”

States that did not end up setting up there own Obamacare exchanges also received money, according to ATR’s research.

Alabama for example, received $9,772,451 in two grants in 2010 and 2011 one for planning the exchange and the other to “support core staff, contracts, and activities around early implementation of the Alabama Health Insurance Exchange.”

Many of the states that did end up creating their own exchanges received more money than those that did not.

ATR’s tax policy director Ryan Ellis told The Daily Caller that it was not clear from CMS’ records what ended up happening to the money provided to states to set up exchanges that in the end decided not establish their own exchange.

“Presumably, [the funding] was to try to get those states to change their mind at an earlier stage of development,” Ellis wrote in an email.

Via Daily Caller

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President Obama tells high-rolling Democrats he still has 'three years left' to fix Obamacare website

After coming clean with the country over the botched Obamacare rollout, President Obama sought solace with high-rolling Democrats in Philadelphia Thursday night.

Obama assured 120 guests at a swanky soirée he still had "three years left in this office," listing that at the top of his "to do" list was "fixing a website," according to excerpts of his comments from WPVI.

RELATED: OBAMA ANNOUNCES FIX FOR CANCELED PLANS FROM OBAMACARE

The coterie of wealthy Dems showed up to see Obama at Comcast exec. David Cohen's Mount Airy mansion, raising an estimated $1 million for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

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"[It's] significant that he's here when times are tough," Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) said about the Commander-in-Chief facing the music from those in the party.

Via: Daily News

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Congressman: Benghazi attackers knew location of ambassador's safe room

The terrorists who attacked the Benghazi consulate last year knew the location of the safe room where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his security team sought shelter, according to a congressman who spoke for 90 minutes with the diplomatic security agent severely injured in the assault.

"He confirmed this - that it was a very well orchestrated, and well organized, almost a military operation, using military weapons and using military signals," the late Florida Rep. Bill Young said after meeting diplomatic security agent David Ubben at Walter Reed Medical Center last summer, when both were patients there. 

After Young's death in mid-October, his widow, Beverly Young, gave Fox permission to use her husband’s comments about the Sep. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the record.  The congressman had originally spoken to Fox on background last summer.

"He (Ubben) emphasized the fact that it was a very, very military type of operation they had knowledge of almost everything in the compound," Young explained. "They knew where the gasoline was, they knew where the generators were, they knew where the safe room was, they knew more than they should have about that compound."

Via: Fox News

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How President Obama Is Killing Jobs

Five years on and President Obama still refuses to assume responsibility for his woeful economic record. The buck stops with Republicans, other countries, changes in the weather, etc.—anywhere but the Oval Office. Of course, it’s not new having a chief executive who refuses to admit failure. What is rare is having a news media that does not hold the President accountable.

So let’s establish the record. At 2.2 percent annual growth, we are now witnessing the slowest economic recovery in generations. Even the Council on Foreign Relations says “the economic expansion following the 2008 recession has been the weakest of the post-World War II era.” This is true across a number of fronts: economic growth, housing prices, industrial production and capacity, etc.

Liberals cry that what we need is more government overspending, which without a trace of irony they call “stimulus.” In other words, they want us to ignore the fact that this Administration and the Federal Reserve have spent more on government-based economic “stimulus” than any other in America’s history, and with little to show.

Via: The Foundry

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OBAMA’S STUMBLING BUMBLING FUMBLING NEWS CONFERENCE

We learned a few interesting things from President Barack Obama’s rambling, analogy-filled news conference Thursday.

We learned that there was a fumble. We learned that technology is hard. In fact, the president went on for an extended period of time explaining government’s historical struggles with IT issues. Considering that the entire backbone of the law is dependent on this technology and expertise, how can anyone truly believe that the Nov. 30 deadline set for HealthCare.gov to work properly is going to be met? And why should anyone trust that IT will work better in the future?

We also learned, despite this traditional technology deficit, the president was not “informed directly” about the challenges facing the website, because he would never be “stupid enough to say this is going to be as easy as shopping around on Amazon or Travelocity.”

We learned that buying insurance is complex business — more complex even than buying an airline ticket. It’s not “like buying a song on iTunes,” the president said. It’s “a much more complicated transaction.” But one of the selling points of Obamacare exchanges was that they would simplify the process. Exchanges were supposed to offer consumers no-hassle, straightforward choices.

Via: Human Events

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Sheila Jackson Lee: Insurance Companies Should Not Have Sent Out Cancellation Letters, They Should Have Sent Letters Telling Them Their Insurance Was Getting Better…

"Is she still living in a Fantasy World?"

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, told National Review Online today that instead of sending out cancellation letters, insurance companies should have told their customers that their coverage was about to get better.

She said she wrote an amendment before the president’s announcement that would require insurance companies to “tell the truth.”

“The cancellation notice was not the truth,” she says. “It should have been: ’We intend to or expect to modify your insurance.’”

She adds that cancellation is what happens “when you don’t pay your premium, or something has happened in the bad old days,” but that’s not what’s happening here.

“A cancellation notice was the inappropriate document to send without notice,” she continues. “All they had to do is that, ‘This is a notice to say that we’re going to improve your insurance, not, in essence, eliminate your insurance.’”

Via: NRO

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Why Doesn’t The UAW Want A Secret-Ballot Election At VW?

It is a long-standing precedent that unions are legally allowed to lie to workers in order to get their support–and lie they do.

Take, for example, Carol Wilson, a Volkswagen employee in Chattanooga who was misled into signing a UAW authorization card.

“When I was approached to sign a card a year and a half ago, it was, ‘Oh, the card just means you want more information.‘”

Lying to workers in order to get them to sign union authorization cards is, unfortunately, a common tactic.

It is also one of the reasons unions like the idea of card-check–the process of unionization based on signatures, as opposed to secret-ballot elections.

In Chattanooga, where the UAW has claimed that it has gotten a majority of VW’s employees to support the union’s efforts, the does not want employees to vote by secret-ballot on unionization.

Why? Because, according to the UAW, it will lose.

“We’ve determined we definitely have a majority of employees who favor this representation,” Casteel told the Tennessean last month. “But we are not seeking a vote necessarily.”

Why not, if that is what the workers want?

“We know if we go for a traditional election where the outside organizations could campaign against us, we’d probably lose,” Casteel said. [Emphasis added.]

Via: Red State

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Lies Transcend all Colours

The evil sin of lying does not come in any particular colour.  White men lie; black men lie and politicians of both colours do it all the time.

Over in the UK, US talk show queen Oprah Winfrey is using South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s shout “You lie!” when President Barack Obama was pushing the benefits of his now epic fail Affordable Health Care Act, aka ObamaCare, as proof positive that dislike for the president comes down to “the colour of his skin”.

Winfrey, talking to BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz about her starring role in The Butler, which recounts the life of an African American man who grows up on a cotton plantation,  raised Wilson’s calling out Obama a liar as evidence that Americans don’t like Obama based on the colour of his skin.

“Asked if some of the challenges and criticisms faced by President Barack Obama were down to the colour of his skin, she said: “There’s no question.” (BBC, Nov. 13, 2013)

“She recalled an incident in 2009 when Mr Obama was giving a speech to Congress, and Republican congressman Joe Wilson called out “you lie”.

“Remember that?” she said. “I think there’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs.

“And that occurs in some cases, and maybe even many cases, because he’s African American. There’s no question about that. And it’s the kind of thing no one ever says, but everybody’s thinking it.

Via: Canada Free Press

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COUNTDOWN: US HITS DEBT CEILING IN 84 DAYS

Twelve weeks from today, the US government will hit its borrowing limit. When Congress lifted the debt ceiling last month, for the first time ever, it pegged the increase to a specific date, rather than a dollar amount. The current borrowing authority expires in just 84 days, on February 7th. 

Three major policy challenges are converging in January. Government spending authority expires in the middle of the month, just three weeks ahead of the debt ceiling. There is also likely to be ongoing agonizing about the implementation of ObamaCare. 

January 1st is the deadline for individuals to have insurance. If the website isn't fixed or if young and healthy Americans haven't yet signed up for coverage, insurers will begin panicking and ObamaCare itself could start to unravel. Millions of healthy individuals are needed in the exchanges to subsidize the costs of treating sick and elderly patients. There could be additional measures in Congress to change or delay the law. 

Budget, ObamaCare and Debt. It's the ultimate three-ring DC circus. With his approval ratings exploring new lows, Obama has little political capital for leverage. He won't be able to run the tables on all three issues. He will have to give somewhere.

It may be the biggest decision of his Presidency.  

Via: Breitbart

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House votes to let Americans keep health plans; 39 Dems defy Obama

Nearly 40 House Democrats defied President Obama and helped the Republican majority pass a bill Friday that lets Americans keep, for one year, health plans that do not comply with Obamacare.

The defections from 39 members of Mr. Obama’s party highlighted the pressure on Congress to help people who lost coverage because of the president’s signature law, as balky websites keep a veil over alternative plans and pressure mounts on the Democrat-led Senate to forge a remedy.

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“Let’s face it, millions of people right now have a cancelled policy,” Rep. Ron Barber, Arizona Democrat, said before voting for the Keep Your Health Plan Act.

The House passed the bill, 261 to 157, despite a veto threat from Mr. Obama and objections from Democrats who said the legislation was an insidious attempt to rot the Affordable Care Act from the inside out.

Four Republicans voted against the bill, perhaps because it could be viewed as an attempt to smooth over Mr. Obama’s controversial reforms.

Rep. Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, offered the bill at the height of furor over Mr. Obama’s oft-repeated promise that people who liked their health plans could keep them. Millions of Americans received cancellation notices because their plans did not meet the health care law’s coverage requirements, forcing the president to apologize as vulnerable Democrats scrambled to find a legislative solution.

Via: Washington Times
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Krauthammer: The Real Reason Liberals Are Panicked About ObamaCare

“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.”

— Bill Clinton, Nov. 12

So the former president asserts that the current president continues to dishonor his “you like your plan, you can keep your plan” pledge. And calls for the Affordable Care Act to be changed, despite furious White House resistance to the very idea.

Coming from the dean of the Democratic Party, this one line marked the breaching of the dam. It legitimized the brewing rebellion of panicked Democrats against Obamacare. Within hours, that rebellion went loudly public. By Thursday, President Obama had been forced into a rear-guard holding action, asking insurers to grant a one-year extension of current plans.

The damage to the Obama presidency, however, is already done. His approval rating has fallen to 39 percent, his lowest ever. And, for the first time, a majority considers him untrustworthy. That bond is not easily repaired.

At stake, however, is more than the fate of one presidency or of the current Democratic majority in the Senate. At stake is the new, more ambitious, social-democratic brand of American liberalism introduced by Obama, of which Obamacare is both symbol and concrete embodiment.

Via: Fox News

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[CARTOON] Defending Obama

Via: California Political Review

California Man Sees His Premiums Double Under ACA

Doesn’t look like it saved David $2,500 a year does it?

Via: Weasel Zippers

[VIDEO] Brent Bozell Cracks Up Hannity: CNN, MSNBC Obamacare Spin 'Would Make Baghdad Bob Blush'

On Thursday night’s Media Mash on the Hannity show on Fox News Channel, Sean Hannity and MRC president Brent Bozell laughed about MSNBC’s Michael Smerconish, Ed Schultz, and Chris Matthews being the Three Stooges of Obamacare for attacking anyone (including the "so-called independent media") who’s admitting there was a rollout fiasco.

When they turned to how MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe and CNN’s Sanjay Gupta (who originally planned in 2009 to join the Obama administration to sell Obamacare) both used crappy-automobile analogies to disparage policies that were being cancelled by Obama, Bozell made Hannity laugh some more: (Video and transcript below)

MSNBC.com's RICHARD WOLFFE (MSNBC's The Last Word, October 30): This is a bit like someone saying, ‘I’m going to sell you a $500 car, and then that pesky government says this car has to be road-worthy.’

Dr. SANJAY GUPTA (CNN's Piers Morgan Live, November 12): The number one cause of bankruptcy in United States is medical bills. And a large part of that is because there are really bad plans out there. I mean, I think this is a little bit of a red herring and, if you look at the numbers, this is a relatively small percentage of the population that we're talking about, that fits into this idea that they have plans, they want to keep them because they are buying insurance already on the individual market. But we have regulations for cars that are unsafe! People say, "I want to keep my Pinto. I don't want to be forced to buy a Ferrari."

HANNITY: They just rationalize the president’s made promises when he was selling this piece of garbage!

BOZELL: This is spin that, this is the kind of spin that would make Baghdad Bob blush. (Laughter) Look – and again, they’re saying – The insulting nature of it. The insurance policy you bought for your family is a Pinto! It's a piece of crap in their mind’s eye! President Obama was doing the right thing by canceling it.

HANNITY: You said I could keep my Pinto. Let me keep my Pinto.

The segment concluded with a clip of Chris Matthews demanding a purge of the Obama-hating “right wingers” from the Republican coalition: “Not once has Boehner or McConnell ever stood up and said, 'Those people are unacceptable,' in the way that Bill Buckley in the 1950s said anti-Semitism is not allowed in the American conservative coalition. Nobody says it.”

Bozell, the nephew of Bill Buckley, quickly dismissed that bile: “For him to evoke William F. Buckley, what he is doing is saying that the Republican Party needs to throw out the beliefs of William F. Buckley.”

Bozell appears weekly on "Hannity" to bring the MRC's latest clips of outrageous spin to the Fox News audience across America.

Via: Newsbusters

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Ben Stein: Obama Making 'Annihilation' of Jews Possible

Commentator Ben Stein said on Thursday that President Barack Obama's "deeply naïve" premise that Iran would suddenly end its nuclear activities in exchange for an easing of sanctions that have crippled its economy for five years would make the "annihilation" of Jews possible.

"Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror," Stein said in The American Spectator.  "The Iranians in the recent past have pledged to destroy the Jewish people in the Middle East.

"Some of their leaders have boasted that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, Iran will have 'a holocaust in an afternoon' by rocketing a few nuclear weapons into Israel," Stein added. "Naturally, the Israelis are desperately worried."

A round of talks between Iran and world powers in Geneva fell short of an expected deal on Sunday after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius objected, saying the terms of a preliminary agreement were too easy on Tehran.

The deal would not have required Iran, for instance, to close any of its 18,000 uranium centrifuges or its heavy water reactor in Arak, which would serve as a source of plutonium when it starts operations in about two years.
Stein, who also is a commentator for Newsmax Magazine, said the Geneva negotiations resulted from "peace feelers" sent across the world by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who was elected in June.

"If the western powers will greatly ease the sanctions, Iran, so they promise, will freeze its nuclear program where it stands now — some months from having a working bomb," Stein said, referring to world leaders who are encouraging an agreement.

Secretary of State John Kerry is representing the U.S. in the negotiations.

"The problem is," Stein continued, "that Iran has made many promises about stopping the nuclear program. It has not kept any of them. It has not signed the non-proliferation treaty. It has not allowed inspectors in its most secret plants. It has raced on towards nuclear weapons that could in a half-hour or less cause another holocaust.

Via: Newsmax

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