Conservative Happenings

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Super Bowl Champs Get $130,000 to Promote Obamacare

The professional football team that won this year’s Super Bowl is getting $130,000 from American taxpayers to promote Obamacare, according todocuments obtained by Judicial Watch this week.

The deal was secured on September 9 between the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League (NFL) and Maryland health officials. The White House has tried recruiting professional sports leagues—especially the NFL and the National Basketball Association (NBA)—to help promote the president’s healthcare law but they have declined.

In fact, the NFL confirmed months ago that it would not participate in the Obamacare public relations campaign, offering the media this written statement: “We have responded to the letters we received from members of Congress to inform them we currently have no plans to engage in this area and have had no substantive contact with the administration about [the health-care law’s] implementation.” Washington D.C.’s mainstream newspaper called it a “blow to the administration.”

But Maryland officials evidently appealed directly to the home team, announcing in early September that the Ravens would help market the state’s Obamacare exchange known as Maryland Health Connection. Both parties refused to offer specifics when the deal was initiated and Judicial Watch filed a Maryland Public Information Act request for details.

In a “Sponsorship Agreement” between the Maryland Health Connection and the Ravens, the state will pay the Super Bowl champs $130,000 to push Obamacare on television, radio, the team’s official website, its newsletter and in social media. This includes the Ravens Report Show on cable TV and a number of pre and post-game radio segments as well as Facebook and Twitter plugs.

Via: Judicial Watch

BREAKING Lack Of Security Lets You See What Prices On Healthcare.gov Look Like BEFORE Subsidies…

Healthcare.gov features a tool to search through health insurance providers in your area to see how much Obamacare can save you. The catch? The catch is, those prices are all AFTER maximum subsidies are calculated into the price by the website.

This is apparently the lack of insecurity you can expect from the folks at HHS and healthcare.gov. A level of incompetence and lack of common sense programming I didn’t even think were possible for government until today.

Want to see what the prices are without subsidies? Well someone forgot to password the database the prices are fetched from. If you want to see it in all its glory head on over to data.healthcare.gov and see it for yourself.

Via: Weasel Zippers

THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT - Obamacare's middle-class sticker shock

President Obama defended his health care reform at the White House on Monday, citing three consumers who he says have benefited from the law. But millions of others are losing their insurance policies, or are seeing premiums balloon.

Last week I got news that my health insurance costs are going up. A lot. In 2014 my monthly premium for a family of four will increase 15 percent to $575, my deductible will double to $3,000 and I will lose my drug coverage, adding another $100 a month to my expenses. My story is typical for employees of Gannett, the Detroit News’ parent company, and other businesses across the country.

Obamacare is not just creating havoc in state exchanges, it is roiling the larger private health insurance market. Costs are skyrocketing thanks to the expensive mandates, regulations and taxes buried in the Affordable Car Act.

Call it the Unaffordable Care Act.

Billed by President Barack Obama as a historic reform that would reduce heath insurance costs by $2,500 a year and cover 40 million uninsured, the program is dictating terms to every health insurer while offering employees a grim choice of rising costs with their company plan or seeking refuge in unworkable, expensive government-run state exchanges.

While many small employers have welcomed a delay in the ACA’s employer mandate until 2015, businesses that already provide insurance are facing Obamacare’s new reality. The bad news has come in waves as companies like Home Depot and Trader Joe’s announced they are dropping coverage for part-time employees. Hundreds of thousands of consumers are losing their “mini-med plans” because they don’t meet Washington’s minimum requirements. Now come the premium increases for self-insured businesses that an analysis by Duke University’s Center for Health Policy estimates will cost an average family $800 a year. In Michigan, for example, insurance costs for the Extreme Chrysler dealership in Jackson are going up 70 percent and Michigan Group Benefits insurance says its clients’ average increase is 23 percent.

Via: Detroit News

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MS Word’s Spell Check Still Flags “Obamacare”

Maybe that’s with good reason. The latest incriminating—well-written, too, I dare say—account I’ve read of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or “Obamacare”) is at MoneyMorning.

We’ve all read such accounts. They’re proliferating and coming, uh, “fast and furious,” from everywhere. I think it’s inevitable that, once the federal government corrects the glitches in its PPACA sign-up websites and people are actually able to apply for coverage, the rage at increased costs—required by law, no less—will become epidemic, and that rage will only grow when costs and taxes increase more next year, all as a result of the PPACA: all part of the plan.

One result of this is that democrats who inextricably tied themselves to the PPACA during the “shutdown” will be in serious trouble. Another result will be the PPACA’s inevitable repeal, and don’t believe that can’t happen. The Prohibition Amendment—for just one example—was repealed several years after it had passed, even though it had woven its way into the American fabric. Like the PPACA, it was bad law and, like the PPACA will be, it was repealed.

Meanwhile, I think we can strengthen and speed that process along by providing source-cited, factual information about the PPACA.

I’ll explain. The MoneyMorning story, while well-written, has what I believe to be a factual inaccuracy:

Via: Red State

Bombshell: Federal judge suddenly green-lights lawsuit that could stop Obamacare in its tracks

Small-business plaintiffs say the government is treating all 50 states the same even though Congress allowed them to opt out – and 36 did.

The IRS is granting insurance subsidies to taxpayers in the 'refusenik' states, even though the text of the Obamacare law doesn't allow it.

A federal judge denied the government's motion to dismiss the case on Tuesday.

He also refused, however, to issue an injunction barring the Obama administration from implementing the law while the case moves forward.

The IRS has been offering tax incentives to citizens in all 50 states to get them to enroll in Obamacare, the plaintiffs say, although the Affordable Care act forbids it in the 36 states that have opted out.

A federal judge on Tuesday refused to dismiss a case that could fatally cripple the Obamacare health insurance law.

The Affordable Care Act forbids the federal government from enforcing the law in any state that opted out of setting up its own health care exchange, according to a group of small businesses whose lawsuit got a key hearing Monday in federal court.

The Obama administration, according to their lawsuit, has ignored that language in the law, enforcing all of its provisions even in states where the federal government is operating the insurance marketplaces on the error-plagued Healthcare.gov website.

Thirty-six states chose not to set up their exchanges, a move that effectively froze Washington, D.C. out of the authority to pay subsidies and other pot-sweeteners to convince citizens in those states to buy medical insurance.

But the IRS overstepped its authority by paying subsidies in those states anyway, say the businesses and their lawyers

The subsidies serve as a trigger that determines who has to comply with the now-famous individual and employer mandates. So, the lawsuit claims, the Obama administration illegally enforced the Affordable Care Act – suddenly making millions of taxpayers and small employers subject to paying fines if they don't play ball.

The Affordable Care Act authorizes subsidies only for policies purchased 'through an Exchange established by the State.'

A different section of the law empowers the federal government to set up its own exchanges for each state that chose not establish one.

Via: Mail Online

Video: Carney Bolts Press Briefing Room After Repeatedly Refusing To Answer Questions About Obamacare…

They asked him about the failed tests in the days leading up to the launch, he referred them to HHS:

Asked him about decision to bring on Jeff Zients to help fix the problems, he referred them to HHS:

Asked him about the costs associated with fixing the site, he referred them to HHS:

Via: Weasel Zippers

Charlie Daniels: Where did it all go wrong?

I am seriously concerned with the place our nation is right now and even more seriously concerned about where it is headed.

It seems that part of the people care about what’s happening, part don’t care and a large part doesn’t know and don’t want to know.

Any thinking person who loves their children and grandchildren has to stop and consider the disaster this generation is passing on to them. I say this generation, knowing that preceding generations had a lot to do with our plight, but we as the generation in charge when the tipping point came, are the last generation that had a chance to do anything about it before the international train wreck happens and it seems that we, at least a majority of us, have chosen to keep our heads under the cover hoping the monsters will be gone when we come up for air.

Of course that’s not going to happen and as much as it goes against the eternal optimist in me to say it, I fear… no, I’m convinced that the United States of America will shortly find our collective testicles in a pair of vise grips and our feet bogged down in knee deep mud.

Our current economic policies are just impossible to sustain and as the debt explodes, the dollar decreases in value, the entitlement rolls grow and America is encouraged to become more and more dependent on a monolithic central government, we will never pull out of our self induced nose dive before our fiscal plane crashes to the ground.

Having said that – and by the way, for the benefit of you cherry pickers, I fervently hope I’m wrong – I got to wondering what thing, or combination of things, brought us to this sorry state of affairs.

Via: The Right Scoop

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

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