Obama Weekly Address: Enrolling in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace Saturday October 26, 213

President Barack Obama intends to publish a weekly video address every Saturday morning of his presidency.

• In this week’s address, President Obama discusses the launch of the Health Insurance Marketplace for the Affordable Care Act, which gives millions of Americans the opportunity to have access to affordable and reliable healthcare—many for the first time. 

  Via: White House
  
  

WHO IS THE MYSTERIOUS OBAMACARE GIRL FEATURED ON THE WEBSITE’S HOME PAGE?

You have probably seen her face before, but do you know who that brunette girl is smiling back at you when you log onto healthcare.gov?

Odds are you don’t, but you aren’t alone.

Multiple media outlets, including USA Today and Fox News, have scoured the Internet and looked through stock photo agencies’ catalogs, social media and even through photographs of Democratic operatives — but the mysterious girl has yet to be found.

–Have a tip? Scroll to the bottom of this page and leave it in our tip box–

(Image Source: Healthcare.gov)

The woman, who media outlets are desperately trying to identify, has become the face of the glitch-ridden healthcare.gov website.

CNN even devoted an entire segment to her, asking for information about who she may be.

Via: The Blaze

Continue Reading......

Seattle seizes elderly woman's parking lot to turn it into -- a parking lot

The city of Seattle is forcing a 103-year-old woman to give up her private waterfront parking lot to make way for a city-owned parking lot.

The City Council voted Monday to use its power of eminent domain to acquire the lot owned by Spokane resident Myrtle Woldson, who has repeatedly turned down offers to purchase the property, Q13FOX.com reported.

According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the city wants to acquire Woldson's property to mitigate the loss of other parking lots during the construction of a $2.1 billion tunnel that will replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

City officials have said that they plan to keep the lot for surface parking, even though city and state transportation documents call for structured parking along Seattle's central waterfront area, including Woldson's lot, the newspaper reported.

Gary Beck, president of Republic Parking Northwest, which operates the lot, told the Puget Sound Business Journal that Woldson once turned down a $20 million-dollar offer for the property.

“It makes no fiscal sense to me to have the city condemn a parking lot to make more parking,” Beck said.

Via: Fox News

Continue Reading......

Matthews: ‘If We Get a Fact Wrong [on Hardball], We Are Being Dishonest and Incompetent’ (WHICH IS ALL THE TIME)

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
October 25, 2013 11:15 pm

MSNBC host Chris Matthews said Hardball producers go for the stories that are “heat seeking” and “driven by facts” Friday on Up Late.

Matthews noted Hardball does not “have a correction page,” and thus “if we get a fact wrong, we are being dishonest and incompetent”:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Every show is different. All our producers know our job is — is — heat seeking. I admit it. Go for the heat. Fact driven. Do both. Go for the heat. You can’t make it boring. It’s got to be driven by facts. We don’t have a correction page like the New York Times. If we get a fact wrong, we are being dishonest and incompetent.

Currently, Chris Matthews’ Politifact file has three statements evaluated, only one of which is rated “true.”

CBS 10 Tampa ran this piece last year on one of Matthews’ more egregious errors when he factually butchered the details of Florida’s 48 hour voter registration rule:

It does not appear Matthews apologized for being “dishonest and incompetent” in this instance.

VIA: WFB

Continue Reading.....

Former CIA Dir. Hayden: World Outrage Over US Snooping 'Political Theater'

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden tells Newsmax a report that the National Security Agency spied on world leaders is "terribly damaging" — but he believes the outrage expressed by those leaders is to some extent "political theater."

The retired 4-star Air Force General also says the anti-terrorism efforts begun by President George W. Bush and continued by the Obama administration are "lawful, effective, and appropriate."

Declassified: The Simple Roadmap That Helped Create Over $41 Billion in New WealthHayden served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from May 2006 until February 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration. He also served as Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1999 to 2005, and is now on the Advisory Board of LIGNET.com, a Washington, D.C.-based intelligence analysis and forecasting service affiliated with Newsmax.

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV on Friday, Hayden was asked if NSA leaker Edward Snowden's claim that every call and every Internet transaction in the United States goes through the NSA is accurate.

"No, period," he declares. "It's not accurate."

Hayden also discusses the new report in The Guardian asserting that the NSA monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders — after President Obama this week called German Chancellor Angela Merkel to insist the U.S. wasn't monitoring her calls.

Via: Newsmax

Continue Reading.....

Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998

George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.

As reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for the Obamacare account. CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the Bush administration to provide certain tech services to the federal government. A senior vice president for the company testified this week before The House Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies submitted bids, but did not name those companies or explain why only CGI’s bid was considered.

On the government end, construction of the disastrous Healthcare.gov website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of longtime failed website-builder Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services.

Update: The Daily Caller repeatedly contacted CGI Federal for comment. After publication of this article, the company responded that there would be “nothing coming out of CGI for the record or otherwise today.” The company did however insist that The Daily Caller include a reference to vice president Cheryl Campbell’s House testimony. This has been included as a courtesy to the company.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading.....

An Insurance Death Spiral?

The severe technical problems that continue to plague the federal Obamacare exchanges (and some state-run ones) have got people contemplating some pretty extraordinary scenarios.

Some of these have to do expressly with the fact that people cannot readily obtain coverage. The idea of delaying the individual mandate, which not two weeks ago was dismissed by the Democrats as a right-wing fantasy, is now being advanced by some Democratic senators, since you can’t very well fine people for not being able to use a site that doesn’t work. We may (and should) soon be talking about “grandfathering” all 2013 insurance plans, too, as millions of people in the individual market have their coverage cancelled with nowhere to go.

But the scenario most frequently talked about is the possibility of an “insurance death spiral” in the exchanges. And here I think two kinds of misunderstanding have been rampant — one that might cause us to understate the danger and another that might cause us to overstate it. Major adverse selection problems in the exchanges are, and always have been, likely, but a death spiral as it is usually understood is not. 

An insurance death spiral, or adverse-selection spiral, would be a kind of second-order consequence of the website fiasco: The fact that it is so difficult to sign up for exchange coverage may mean that only highly motivated consumers do sign up, and those are likely to be people with high expected health costs. If the exchanges end up containing too many people in poor health and not enough people in good health, insurers could take massive losses in 2014 and be forced to dramatically raise premiums for 2015 plans to better price the risk they would be taking on. Those higher premiums would cause even more healthy people to avoid getting coverage, leaving the risk pool in even worse shape and so driving even further premiums hikes, and the cycle would continue. Several states have seen this kind of catastrophic degradation of insurance risk pools over the years when introducing insurance rules like those that will govern the exchanges (most notably New York and Washington State, as Peter Suderman noted this week), and many observers (not to mention insurers) now fear we may see it in the new exchange system.

Via: NRO

Continue Reading.....

Adelson: US should drop atomic bomb on Iran

American-Jewish billionaire blasts Obama over negotiations with Tehran; says US should show Iran nuclear capabilities.

NEW YORK – During a panel at Yeshiva University on Tuesday evening, Sheldon Adelson, noted businessman and owner of the newspaper Israel Hayom, suggested that the US should use nuclear weapons on Iran to impose its demands from a position of strength.

Asked by moderator Rabbi Shmuley Boteach whether the US should negotiate with Iran if it were to cease its uranium enrichment program, Adelson retorted, “What are we going to negotiate about?”

Adelson then imagined what might happen if an American official were to call up an Iranian official, say “watch this,” and subsequently drop a nuclear bomb in the middle of the Iranian desert.

"Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development. You want to be peaceful? Just reverse it all, and we will guarantee you that you can have a nuclear power plant for electricity purposes, energy purposes’," Adelson said.



“So a tremendous demonstration of American strength?” Boteach clarified. “So that they would get the message?” 

Via: Jerusalem Post

Continue Reading......

Toward Single-Payer: We're Almost There

Seventy-five years ago, it was lawyers, doctors, and shop owners; today, it's insurance companies.  These free-enterprise for-profits are the main obstacle to instituting a single-payer health care system in the U.S.  They must be removed from the equation if Obama is to realize his dream.

While everyone focuses on the latest ObamaCare IT screw-up, the ongoing abolition of for-profit insurance companies continues.

Consider this timeline.  In June 2003, Obama made his future intentions clear.

From an Illinois AFL-CIO speech:

I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. [Applause.] I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.

Five years after his AFL-CIO declaration to bring single-payer/universal health coverage to America, Obama was asked in a Feb. 21, 2008 debate if he differed with his opponent Hillary Clinton concerning insurance mandates.  Obama replied that their goals were the same but that "we have to take a different way."

Via: American Thinker

Continue Reading.....

Megyn Kelly interviews Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel, turns out he’s a know-it-all jerk

A Tale of Two States, CA and NV: Part III

Nevada’s aggressive pro-business policies, and the agencies charged with selling the state, have produced decidedly mixed results. While the state has made some gains in reducing unemployment, challenges lie ahead.

Nevada’s aggressive pro-business policies, and the agencies charged with selling the state, have produced decidedly mixed results. While the state has made some gains in reducing unemployment, challenges lie ahead.

As described in Part II, several businesses — such as Starbucks and Apple — have expanded operations in Nevada as a result of direct lobbying from different business development agencies.

Smaller firms have moved to Nevada, as well. Orange County-based Kareo, an online back office service provider for health care offices, recently announced plans to expand 112 jobs to Southern Nevada. Altogether, thousands of jobs have left California for Nevada.  In fact, California lost 5.2 percent of its businesses in 2012 (though some were closed and did not move).

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows an improving Nevada. Down from a high of 14 percent two years ago, unemployment stands at 9.5 percent. There are more jobs in 10 out of 11 sectors of the economy than there were 12 months ago, or even two years ago. Government, manufacturing, business services, education and mining are all doing well, for example.

But there is more than just businesses and jobs coming to Nevada from California — people are too.

Population growth

While California’s population is flat-lining, Nevada’s is projected to grow. At least part of that reason is the new taxes enacted last year in California.

From a Fox News report describing the effects of Proposition 30:

Nevada tax accountant George Ashley said he’s received more than 100 inquiries from higher-earning Californians about the possible tax advantages and feasibility of relocating to a state with lower taxes.

“We have had a 10-fold increase from various parts of California, particularly Los Angeles and the Bay Area where many people are seeking a way to leave the state,” said Ashley, who lives just over the California state line in Lake Tahoe, Nev. “They are fed up with the situation and they feel like they are being unfairly treated.”

This trend has real impacts: Between 1999 and 2009, California lost $27 billion in tax revenue because residents moved to other states. In that same time period, Nevada’s added $12.4 billion to its coffers from residents of other states that moved to the Silver State.

Via: California Political Review

Continue Reading.....

Healthcare.gov: You Don't Need Insurance to Get Health Care Free

(CNSNews.com) – Last year, the Obama administration went all the way to the Supreme Court to fend off challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act--AKA Obamacare--that argued that the federal government had no constitutional authority to order Americans to buy health insurance.

Thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts, the administration won a landmark 5-4 victory, establishing the power of the federal government to force individuals to purchase products so long as that mandate is enforced through a "tax."

Now Healthcare.gov, the government-run website where people can buy Obamacare-mandated health insurance plans through government-run exchanges, informs people that they actually do not need to buy a legally-mandated health insurance plans to get health care for free.

A tab on the website entitled “Finding Health Care You Can Afford," tells visitors: “There may be local facilities that provide free or reduced-cost care, whether you're insured or not. What you pay depends on your income.”

If you click on the “Learn More” tab, it brings you to a page that provides further details on how you can secure free and reduced-cost health care without buying on of the Obamacare-mandated plans.

Via: CNS News

Continue Reading.....

[CARTOON] Sebelius and Obamacare

Via: California Political Review

Company behind Obamacare website in charge of nearly $2 billion in Sandy relief

CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy.

In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.

Item five of the meeting agenda reads:

Mr. Nelson presented that the State received a $1.7 billion allocation in CDBG Disaster Recovery aid from HUD to aid impacted businesses and residences.  He stated that the State’s Action Plan was approved on April 26, 2013 and HTFC is currently in a phase of implementing the program.  He stated that in this phase, the corporation needs to stand-up its recovery programs as soon as possible to deliver critical resources, and in order to do so, the corporation requires immediate access to consultant services to assist in policy and procedure development, training, surge capacity, and call center assistance, and stated that CGI Federal Inc. could provide such services.

The resolution was passed and scheduled to “take effect immediately.”

The Associated Press revealed Tuesday that a mere $700 million of the $60 billion federal aid package – 1.2 percent of the total funds – has been given to victims of super storm Sandy.

Nearly a year after the devastating storm, a majority of the 24,000 families that have requested monetary assistance have yet to receive a penny from the federal aid package.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading.....

[VIDEO] Sebelius: ‘Don’t believe what you’ve heard’

Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Friday urged potential healthcare consumers to disregard ObamaCare website horror stories and partisan bickering over the law.

Speaking at a panel in San Antonio, Texas, Sebelius was asked what advice she would give to those seeking federal healthcare plans.

“Sign up,” she said. “Don’t believe what you’ve heard. Just check it out, look at the prices, look at the plans.”

The Obama administration is working furiously to fix the myriad problems that have plagued the HealthCare.gov website, as the botched rollout has dominated headlines and provoked a round of congressional hearings.

Sebelius is scheduled to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week.

On Friday, Sebelius said she wasn’t happy with the state of the website, but said “significant improvements” have already been made.

“I’d be the first to admit that the website is far from where we want it to be and where it should be,” she said.

“We’ve made significant improvement over the last several weeks but it’s still not functioning at the right pace,” she added.

Via: The Hill

Continue Reading,,,,

States Report Unbelievably Low ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers, One State’s At Zero

The Obamacare rollout has left much to be desired; so much so, in fact, that a few states have reportedly enrolled absolutely no one so far. And there are still other states where enrollment is not quite non-existent, but is still unbelievably low.

Oregon is the most striking example so far. Cover Oregon, the state’s health insurance exchange, has admitted precisely zero people have enrolled due to their “problem-plagued site.” The site was originally going to let consumers sign up directly, but it was then changed to only allow insurance agents and application assisters enroll, which hasn’t happened yet, and officials at Cover Oregon are hoping the site will be up and running properly by Halloween.

Meanwhile, health care navigators in Kansas admitted they have been unable to enroll a single person since Obamacare went live, according to Kansas Watchdog, though there have been some confirmed enrollments through other avenues. The number of those has not, however, been released.

In Michigan it’s “still unclear” how many have signed up, with absolutely zero confirmation that anyone has been able to do so. Only seven people in Alaska have signed up, and the Obama administration proudly touted all the Delaware citizens who signed up by inviting all one of them to the White House.

Oof.

Via: Mediaite.com

Continue Reading.....

CONGRESSIONAL HISPANIC CAUCUS CHAIR ON OBAMACARE FOR ILLEGALS: 'NOT AT THIS TIME'

On Wednesday, House Democrats renewed their push for an immigration bill to be brought to the floor, and although members from both parties favoring passage for such legislation appear confident a bill will surface in the lower chamber in the near future, Democratic members are hesitant to discuss how the issues of immigration reform and Obamacare may intersect at this point.

During an immigration press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D–TX), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told reporters, “Let me set the record straight: comprehensive immigration reform is not dead in the House.” As he stood among other Latino Democratic lawmakers, Hinojosa said, “The time for excuses is over. The time for action is now.”

Illegal immigrants are not currently eligible to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges. However, according to Hinojosa, that may change in the future.

When asked by Breitbart News if he would want immigration reform legislation to allow these illegal aliens to be covered under Obamacare, Hinojosa initially refused to answer and only remarked, “Affordable health care is already written. Those who are undocumented do not qualify.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made a similar statement in May. "It is stated very clearly in the Affordable Care Act, [and] it is our position in the immigration bill: no access to subsidies in the Affordable Care Act. Secondly, no access to Medicaid; no cost to the taxpayer," Pelosi said at the time. "That has always been the Democratic position." 

Via; Breitbart

Continue Reading....

Administration Caught in New Obamacare Dilemma

Remember sequestration? Those automatic budget cuts that went into effect when Congress failed to do real budgeting a couple of years ago? It’s hitting Obamacare now.

Both laws have been around for awhile, but the Obama Administration hasn’t done anything to prepare for their collision.

The cuts are hitting a set of subsidies that were supposed to help pay deductibles and co-pays for lower-income Americans with Obamacare coverage. An Obama official pledged there would be a plan before the Obamacare exchanges opened on October 1, but that didn’t happen.

So now what? Heritage expert Chris Jacobs writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

There are two possible outcomes. The first is that individuals who have managed to enroll in subsidized health insurance will find they’ve been misled about their copays and deductibles. Families who currently think their plan will charge a $20 copayment for doctor visits may instead face a $25 charge when the sequester kicks in. Individuals who now believe they face maximum out-of-pocket costs of $2,000 may end up paying hundreds more.

The other option? Stick the insurance companies with the cuts and tell them to deal with it. (That would be about $286 million through next September.)

Via: The Foundry

Continue Reading.....

Limbaugh: How Were Journalists the Last People to Figure Out How Bad Obamacare Was?

With the Obamacare rollout becoming a trainwreck of sorts, even the liberal media can’t sugarcoat things, but what Rush Limbaugh wanted to know on Friday was why the journalists ended up being the last people to realize just how big of a disaster the health care law would end up being.

He cited recent reporting being done at CBS that appears to strike a tone of disappointment and shock that the health care law isn’t going as planned. Limbaugh was amazed that journalists ended up being reactive to the disaster of Obamacare instead of being active in warning people what was coming.

Limbaugh argued that government inefficiency and ineptitude is “the standard, day-to-day operation of a government-run entity” and the media should have anticipated it, but instead “they are now the last to figure all of this out.”

He sniped at liberals for being “surprised” at people looking at ways to get around the wall they’ve built up, and said the way Obamacare is angering and upsetting people is “undermining the very foundation of Obamacare, all of which was predictable.”

Listen to the audio below, via The Rush Limbaugh Show:

Via: Mediaite.com

Continue Reading.....

REPORT: GOVERNMENT BENEFIT RECIPIENTS OUTNUMBER FULL-TIME WORKERS

Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.

Via: CNS News

Continue Reading.....

6 Presidential-Campaign Themes Hillary Clinton Is Test-Driving

AND NUMBER #1 WITH A BULLET ON THE LIST IS "WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE??"

Hillary Clinton only spoke for a few minutes Thursday night, beside stone columns lit with red and blue lights, and before an iPhone-toting crowd that had gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Center for American Progress. But her words were unmistakably those of a politician who had not yet retired from the electoral game.

She criticized Congress for “careening from crisis to crisis instead of having a plan” and attacked the “scorched earth” politics of the modern age. She praised progressives for pushing “the cause of affordable, quality health care for every American back on the national agenda,” and spoke of her many decades in the trenches of politics. “At the end of the Clinton Administration,” she said, “I knew that if we didn’t have an infrastructure in place to continue to build on what had been accomplished and to hold the line on any efforts at retrenchment, we would not be doing our job.”

It has been like this for months now. Clinton, who claims not to have decided about another presidential run in 2016, has been traveling the country delivering speeches on her own record and current events that sound a lot like precursors to campaign rhetoric. The fact that she is not officially running has not stopped her from testing out themes on the stump, while positioning herself against her likely Republican opponents. The examples show up on both sides of the Atlantic, in paid speeches, at awards dinners, rallies and fundraisers.

Via: TIme Swampland

Continue Reading....