Thread: Obamacare Is Crumbling - Tally So Far: $30.8 Billion, 114 Million Hours in Red Tape

Obamacare Is Crumbling

Phil Kerpen
Mar 25, 2013

Obamacare is falling apart before our eyes. The long-term care insurance program known as the CLASS ACT was deemed financially unworkable and shut down by the administration's own actuaries. Taxpayer-funded health care cooperatives never got off the ground and were shut down in the fiscal cliff deal. Last month the federal Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan stopped accepting enrollment applications. This week 79 U.S. senators, including 34 Democrats, voted to repeal the law's medical device tax. Premiums in the individual and small group markets could spike as much as 116 percent next year. The wheels are already wobbling and the worst is yet to come.

The exchanges at the heart of the new Obamacare entitlement are slated to be up and running for open enrollment beginning October 1. Millions of Americans will be dumped into these exchanges by employers dropping coverage and millions more will be forced to enter the exchanges by the individual mandate. But will there actually be functioning exchanges for them to go to? Maybe not.

The Obamacare law was written to incentivize states to do the heavy lifting of setting up and running the exchanges, which are administratively and technologically complex. But more than half the states said no thanks, looking at the proposed regulations and long-term operating costs and choosing to let the feds try to administer their own mess. And the states that did choose to play ball weren't able to make much progress because the Obama administration stalled key regulations until after the election.

Now the feds are rushing to get the exchanges ready.

"We are under 200 days from open enrollment, and I'm pretty nervous,'' confessed Henry Chao, the deputy chief information officer on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services - which is setting up the federal exchanges. "The time for debating about the size of text on the screen or the color or is it a world-class user experience, that's what we used to talk about two years ago," Chao said. "Let's just make sure it's not a third-world experience."

So don't be surprised if open enrollment doesn't start October 1 as planned. And when the exchanges are up and running, what plans will be available to purchase through them? One effect of stalling the regulations past the election is that the choices offered in most states will be meager simply because there isn't much time to develop plans and make sure they are compliant.

The plans that are offered are going to be expensive because of the law's mandates and regulations. Every major insurer is now warning of a huge spike in premiums, especially for younger, healthier people who can no longer be offered significantly lower rates than older people who use more health care. Some people may get subsidies to help pay - after filling out a 21-page form - but others will find their families ineligible for subsidies unless they stop working full-time or, believe it or not, get divorced.

Democrats want to believe that the future of Obamacare was secured by President Obama's reelection. But if implementation ends up being the disaster that looks increasingly likely, the American people will have the final word.

Obamacare Is Crumbling - Phil Kerpen - [page]

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Obamacare Tally So Far: $30.8 Billion, 114 Million Hours in Red Tape

A Chart You’ll Want to Share as You Gather Pitchforks and Torches

By JIMMIE BISE JR
Published: March 26, 2013 | 0 Comments


Take a look at this chart. If you’re younger than 45 years old, it ought to make you angry. If you’re younger than 30, it ought to make you bloody furious. Your government has put you — us, really, since I’m in the “under 45″ cohort — so far behind the 8-ball we don’t have any clue how badly we’ve been hosed (see the full report in this pdf).

Before I go on, I want to recommend this article at io9 called “Will Old People Take Over the World”. The author begins with the supposition that as our medical technology gets better at extending our lives, we’ll be more productive far longer than we have in the past, and older people will hold their positions of power in politics, corporate boardrooms, and the workplace for far longer. Younger workers, and even middle-aged workers, will have to wait much longer to move up their respective ladders. Then he kicks it over to a “futurist” who gets very close to the problem, but bounces off it, like an asteroid at too steep an approach angle.

But not everyone’s convinced this is going to be a problem. One such voice comes from the sociologist and futurist James Hughes who works at Trinity College in Connecticut. I asked him if a gerontocracy is something we genuinely need to be concerned about.

“There are so many more important forms of unequal power in society that it is hard not to see hand-wringing about gerontocracy as an attempt to distract from corporate malfeasance, patriarchy, white skin privilege, lookism, and so on,” he told io9. “But yes, gerontocracy is one form of power, and there are some ways that our democratic society has ensured health insurance and income stability for seniors that it hasn’t done for working adults simply because seniors are more likely to vote. Is that gerontocracy, though, or the way a democratic society works? People who can’t get themselves organized to demand and defend services get less of them.”

But this inequality, says Hughes, will quickly be erased. His suspicion is that, as we adapt to radical life and health extension, one of the fights that’s set to settle in is the raising and eventual elimination of the retirement age. It’s a fight, he says, that will make the worries about a gerontocracy seem quaint.

“Optimally, however, this struggle will not just sharpen generational antagonism, as portrayed in Christopher Buckley’s novel Boomsday,” he says, “but lead to a more equitable and universal system of income support and social services not based on age.”

So I asked Hughes how society could be hurt if an undying generation refuses to relinquish their hold on power and capital.

“Again, the question should be, how is society hurt when small unaccountable elites control the vast majority of wealth?,” he responded. The age of super-wealthy is pretty immaterial, he says, especially when most of the people in their age bracket will be as poor and powerless as younger cohorts.

“If the wealthy avail themselves of longevity treatments and cognitive enhancements that the hoi polloi can’t afford, and thereby start a feedback loop of privilege — ability and longevity that threatens to create a super-aristocratic master race — then the demand for making those therapies available to everyone will become politically irresistible,” he says. “It’s not that it will happen painlessly, but the democratization of the wealth and longevity technologies of elites is more or less inevitable.”

Problem solved, right? The wealthy older generations amass greater power and privilege until some sort of Underpants Gnome transformation happens and we come out of the wreckage with utopia. No worries.

Before we shrug like our friend the futurist, let’s go back and look at that chart again. It ends at 2010, when the labor force was almost 66 percent and not 63.5 percent as it is today. It doesn’t include Obamacare, which will force younger workers to pay more for their health care whether they want insurance or not to pay for older Americans. It includes for a federal debt of 13.5 trillion, not the over $16 trillion we and our children owe right now. Student loan debt has increased almost $10,000 per person in just seven years and totals over a trillion dollars nationally.

Those bars on the right have grown taller while those on the left have gotten shorter or dipped below the zero line.

There’s more bad news. Thanks to the machinations of our elected officials, much of the wealth older generations could pass down will get gobbled up by the federal government thanks to a 40 percent death tax rate. Where will much of that money go? Back into entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

You might ask, so what? We’re only talking about money here. We can always earn more money and if the economy picks up that labor force will come back and the debt will go down and if Obamacare won’t be the hot mess we all believe it will be, we’ll end up okay in the end. Besides, wealth isn’t everything.

Yes, okay. Wealth isn’t everything, but I’m not just talking about a paycheck here. I’m talking about life. Every year you fall behind in buying a house, establishing yourself in a career, building a family, becoming a member of the community with roots is a year of lost ground you can never fully make up. Your social capital, the connections and influence you build while you work your way up the career and community ladders that you later spend to give greater opportunity to those younger and less established than you, does not accrue. You are poorer, less influential, less free, and less stable in times of crisis than you could be. Opportunity has been stolen from you. Life has been stolen from you.

We have built a vicious cycle of redistribution, not of wealth from rich to poor, but of capital of all kinds from young to old. If we do not stop it, it will get worse. The evidence is right in front of us: the national debt, Obamacare, bailout upon bailout, taxes that punish life-building and reward those who have already built, a culture that vilifies risk-taking and glorifies the “safety” of the government hammock. Our children will begin their lives in a deeper hole andtheir children will be born in a pit so deep they may never climb out though their work their entire lives to do so. We will have stolen their lives as some of our lives have been stolen.

Surely we can tell that story and turn things around. Let’s start with the chart and go from there.

A Chart You’ll Want to Share as You Gather Pitchforks and Torches - Liberty News

Sen. Cruz’ Bill would REPEAL Obamacare.

by CONSERVATIVE ACTION ALERTS on MARCH 26, 2013

ALERT: The Continuing Resolution funds Obamacare, but cannot prevent its full repeal!

Blast Faxes & Tell Congress to REPEAL Obamacare!


Conservative American,

HR 933 – the Continuing Resolution – was a victory for Big Government.

The CR not only keeps the federal government running (or, spending) until late September, it also funds the terrible law given to us via the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
That’s right, through the CR, the Democrats and Establishment GOP members rubber-stamped Obamacare and wrote it a check despite the efforts of Senate and House conservatives to completely defund it.

While lovers of the Welfare State may consider this a victory, it’s our job to tell them otherwise… because the fight to fully trash Obamacare is far from over.

Conservatives in Congress haven’t given up this fight and neither have we — we remain set on seeing every bit of Obamacare overturned!

The good news is there is a bill in the Senate right now that would make this happen.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sponsor of the CR amendment to defund the federal healthcare law – the “Restore Growth First” amendment – is also sponsoring this great legislative effort: Senator Ted Cruz.

Take Action and Blast Faxes to Congress and DEMAND that they co-sponsor Sen. Ted Cruz’ “Obamacare Repeal Act” to get government out of healthcare! The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” must be abolished and replaced with nothing!

Sen. Cruz’ bill – the “Obamacare Repeal Act” (S. 177) – would completely erase the unconstitutional law from the books and get Washington out of the healthcare business altogether.
Upon introducing the bill, the Texas Senator said, “I promised the voters of Texas that the first bill I would file as a U.S. Senator would be to repeal every last word of Obamacare, and that’s a promise I’m proud to keep.”

The Cruz Bill currently has 39 Sponsors in the Senate; and, despite the uphill battle, the Texas Senator remains standing on principle, saying:

“I will continue working hard until we have the votes to repeal Obamacare in its entirety. Obamacare was passed over the strong opposition of the American people, and it has already driven up the cost of health insurance and caused employers to drop their coverage If it continues to be implemented, it will reduce the quality of healthcare, produce scarcity and rationing, and insert government bureaucrats between patients and their doctors. I will continue to work for Texans to expand coverage through effective free-market reforms and to protect the integrity of the doctor-patient relationship.”

Conservative Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a co-sponsor of S. 177, says the following of about government-run healthcare:

“[A]almost everything the American people were told about Obamacare by the bill’s proponents has turned out to be false,” said Senator Lee. “We were promised it would save money.

Now we know it will cost money. In just two short years, the projected ten-year cost of the federal government’s health care takeover has ballooned from $940 billion to $1.76 trillion. We were promised it would help a struggling economy. Now we know it will smother the economy.”

Last Saturday was the healthcare law’s three-year anniversary and already we are seeing the law’s ill-effects on people and the economy: healthcare costs are doubling or tripling for some, and heavy costs mount for the young and healthy (an example of Obama “screwing his own base“). Unions too are getting a taste of the reality of this “free” healthcare scheme.

Conservatives in Congress must fight to prevent Obamacare from having a fourth anniversary! The GOP must stand on principle and OPPOSE Obamacare and seek its repeal!

Take Action and Blast Faxes to Congress and DEMAND that they co-sponsor Sen. Ted Cruz’ “Obamacare Repeal Act” to get government out of healthcare! The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” must be abolished and replaced with nothing!

Obamacare is not only an expensive undertaking that we simply cannot afford – it will cost taxpayers an additional $1 trillion in taxes – it is a disgusting power-grab that gives Washington power that doesn’t rightly belong to it.

State governments are responsible under the Constitution for the health and welfare of those living within their borders – the federal government has been given no authority whatsoever over such matters.

In short, while Obamacare may be called a “law” it is completely unlawful.

Constitutional scholar Michael Anthony Peroutka explains:

“Generally, in order for some action of the legislature, or the executive, or the courts to be valid and enforceable, it needs to favorably pass two tests:

First, it must not violate what our founders called “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Briefly stated, it must be moral.

Secondly, it must not violate the Constitution of these United States. The Constitution limits government authority by enumerating specifically those powers delegated to it by the various states and their people.

If an action of government violates either of these standards, it is no law at all. (We can call it “pretended legislation.”) It is void from the beginning. It doesn’t require a court to declare it to be null and void, though a court may eventually do so. It is void by reason of its conflict with one or both of these fixed standards.”

Obamacare is “pretended legislation,” as Peroutka – citing the Declaration of Independence – claims. The fact is, the federal healthcare law is backed up by nothing other than government fiat!
Conservatives cannot give up in our fight against Washington’s intrusion into healthcare – we must demand our allies in Congress to continue to do whatever it takes to oppose the “law” that was established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act!

Take Action and Blast Faxes to Congress and DEMAND that they co-sponsor Sen. Ted Cruz’ “Obamacare Repeal Act” to get government out of healthcare! The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” must be abolished and replaced with nothing!



For America,
Conservative Action Alerts

www.ConservativeActionAlerts.comP.S. Obamacare can be repealed. Tell Congress to pass S. 177 to abolish the federal healthcare law and replace it with nothing. Select Here to send your free letters to your lawmakers!

Conservative Action Alerts (CAA) is a media outlet protected by the first amendment; no financial contribution to support our efforts is tax-deductible. Diener Consultants, Inc., 10940 S Parker Rd Ste# 763, PARKER, CO 80284-7440

Tagged as: healthcare, Obamacare repeal bill, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,repeal obamacare, ted cruz

Sen. Cruz’ Bill would REPEAL Obamacare.

Senate Votes Overwhelmingly To Repeal Key ObamaCare Tax



Senate Votes Overwhelmingly To Repeal Key ObamaCare Tax - YouTube

http://www.alipac.us/f19/obama-admin...8/#post1334718

Obamacare Will Cause Medical Claims Costs To Jump 32 Percent: Study

Concerned Conservatives

Concerned Conservatives

Concerned Conservatives