DEMOCRAT, uncorks a Nebraska-sized tornado on the president, slamming him for health

**HAPPY2BME** · 03-29-2014, 09:00 AM

Obama 'sucked less than Romney': Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a DEMOCRAT, uncorks a Nebraska-sized tornado on the president, slamming him for health care lies and saying he's not up to saving Social Security

Kerrey, a two-term Senator in the '80s and '90s, is disappointed in the president for risking the health of the U.S. economy over Obamacare
'He had to know he was misleading the audience,' he said of Obama's infamous 'If you like your health care plan' deception
Explains that an even bigger lie Democrats tell is that 'everybody' can get 'high-quality, affordable health care'
Obama, he says, lacks the courage to bring Democrats and Republicans together to save U.S. entitlement programs from bankruptcy
'If he was up to it, he would have done it,' Kerrey tells MailOnline

By David Martosko, U.s. Political Editor
PUBLISHED: 10:58 EST, 28 March 2014 | UPDATED: 11:02 EST, 28 March 2014

Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey thinks President Barack Obama, a fellow Democrat, was re-elected in 2012 because he 'sucked less' than former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The Nebraskan straight-talker told MailOnline in an exclusive interview that Obama isn't up to the job of bringing liberals and conservatives to the table to rescue America's slowly choking entitlement programs.
And Obama, he said Wednesday in his Manhattan office, knew full well he was lying when he promised that the Affordable Care Act would allow Americans to keep insurance plans they liked.

'He had to know he was misleading the audience,' Kerrey said quietly, recalling the newly minted president's countless promises as Congress and the public debated his signature health insurance overhaul.

Not your typical Democrat: Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey opened up with MailOnline about his disappointments with his party and his president

'If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan': Kerrey says many politicians suffer from 'self-delusion' that makes it easier to lie to the public

'On the other hand, he may have said it so many times,' he added, 'that the spell-checker wasn't in the room – the spell-checker, the fact-checker – somebody who says, "Excuse me, Mr. President, but I hope you know this..."'

Obama's infamous four-Pinocchio pledges, Kerrey explained, never stood a chance of being fulfilled because there were 'a million people out there with policies that, for one reason or another, run short of the minimum standard. I mean, they bought something cheaper!'

The White House understood the numbers, Kerrey said, and Republicans did a poor job of explaining the basics of the insurance industry to low-information voters.

Insurers, he said the GOP could have made clear, make money by 'not paying claims,' and by making sure that '80 per cent of the people that are buying insurance don't need it. ... So I need young people to sign up. That's what it's all about.'

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The worst lie Democrats told about Obamacare, Kerrey reasoned, 'is not "If you want to keep your health care plan..." – the worst one is, "Everybody deserves high-quality, affordable health care."'
'Excuse me? Uh, I don't know if you've heard about the bell curve?' he snarked.

'If I've got 1,000 doctors, 100 are great, and 100 are not so good.'

He outlined the shape of a bell curve with his hands, and then threw them skyward.
'It's absolutely impossible,' he said.

'And affordable? Forget about it.'

Kerry is best known for calling former Sen. Rick Santorum an '***hole' in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and for calling Bill Clinton an 'unusually good liar'

Kerry has kept his oar in foreign policy, helming the New School for many years in New York City where he rubbed elbows with foreign leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L)

When the Affordable Care Act met its most vigorous Republican opposition in late 2009, the U.S. economy was still floundering and the business community's eyes were focused on GDP growth, not a new set of health-benefit mandates.

'I wouldn't have done health care,' Kerrey said.'I think the big mistake was ... to say, "Whew! We've got the stimulus done, okay, the economy's going to come bouncing back in 12 months – let's do health care,"' he explained.

'Only the economy didn't come bouncing back.'

'We're teetering on the edge of going out of business through most of 2009,' Kerrey recalled. 'And I think you need to just keep driving, driving, driving on the economy, and make it as bipartisan as possible.'

Life-long pol: In 1992 then-Sen. Kerry made an ultimately failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination that eventually went to Bill Clinton

Obama compounded his rhetorical mistakes with political ones, he said, by agreeing to ditch a proposal allowing Americans to buy into the Medicare system the way they would buy a policy from a private insurer.
'"And now you want to do health care," Kerrey imagined Democratic pols telling Obama near the end of his first year in office. 'It's okay, you're going to do health care. I haven't talked you out of it, Mr. President. [But] don't give on the public option.'

Even if the Obamacare law had died in Congress, he insisted, the politics of holding fast to the public option would have favored Democrats since Medicare is among the federal government's most universally popular programs.

'I would have been much better off campaigning saying, "My opponent does not want you to have the right to buy into Medicare,"' Kerrey mused.

In his Washington, D.C. days, the former Nebraska governor often stood out as the rare Democrat who publicly lamented U.S. entitlement programs' seemingly unstoppable march to insolvency.

'We're robbing from the future to pay for the past,' he told MailOnline on Wednesday. 'We just are.'
'And we're shoveling more and more money to people over the age of 65.'

A lack of political will and a healthy dose of electoral fear, he said, has virtually guaranteed a climate inside the U.S. Capitol where no one will take the first step toward cutting benefits or ratcheting up the national retirement age.

'It's the one thing "R"s and "D"s can agree on,' Kerrey explained. 'Don't screw with seniors.'

Kerrey is a decorated Navy SEAL veteran who has grappled with issues of conscience: He once acknowledged that a Vietnam combat mission for which he was awarded the Bronze Star caused the deaths of 13 to 20 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children

The result, he said, is a set of financial chains clamped tightly on future generations.
During an ill-fated 2012 run to recapture his old Senate seat, Kerrey totaled up Uncle Sam's spending on Medicare, Social Security, and the long-term care portion of Medicaid, and divided it by the number of Americans in the work force.

'All workers,' he insisted, 'including government workers! And the source of their contribution is entirely tax money! But take all of it.'

The cost, he determined, 'is $15,000 per year, per worker.'

Once a politician ... Kerrey tried to win back his old Senate seat in 2012, only to be beaten in the primary by Deb Fischer, who ultimately won the general election

Asked how to break the congressional logjam, Kerrey thought for a moment and said, softly, 'It takes a president. It takes a president.'

Is Barack Obama that president? Kerrey stayed silent but shook his head.
'I'm shaking my head "no,"' he acknowledged, finally.

'If he was up to it, he would have done it. He can't run for re-election.'

Another of Obama's failings, according to Kerrey, is an inflated sense of Americans' appetite for programs to correct what the White House calls 'income inequality,' through new taxes and other income-shifting initiatives that transfer wealth from the rich to the poor.

The president's re-election 17 months ago wasn't a mandate to conduct class warfare, he said.
'After the 2012 election, what the president needed was somebody to say, "Mr. President, I'm thrilled you won. You stand for all the things I support. But honestly, you won this election because you sucked less than Romney."'

Americans, Kerrey believes, lost patience equally with the GOP and the White House during the kabuki theater of fiscal cliff, congressional 'super committee,' budget sequester and tense partial government shutdown.
Obama stuck to his guns at the time, holding out for a 'balanced' budget-gap fix that included new taxes on upper-income Americans.

'Everybody since 1913 has had a mandate to raise taxes on the rich,' Kerrey scoffed at his party's leader. 'This isn't something that you've earned, something that's unique.'

Coplorful: As governor of Nebraska, Kerrey dated actress Debra Winger for more than two years, telling reporters that she 'swept me off my foot' (He lost part of one leg in the Vietnam war.)

Obama isn't the first president to make that kind of miscalculation – Kerrey calls it 'self-delusion' – while in office.

He joked that geneticists will one day soon 'find a base pair' of genes that predisposes people to deception.
And he predicted, half-seriously, that 'they'll find another base pair which say that politicians have 25 per cent more capacity for – you call it lying, I call it self-delusion.'

Bill Clinton, Kerrey once famously hinted, may have been that genetic trait's Darwinian ideal.
'He's an unusually good liar. Unusually good,' the Nebraskan said in 1994.

He told MailOnline that he 'actually intended it as a compliment,' although Clinton 'didn't take it that way.'
Obama's lies, he said, stem from the same human flaw.

'That self-delusion moment comes in a single declaratory sentence,' Kerrey said, which is, "If they just get to know me, they'll vote for me."'

'It's just self-delusion. ... Some of us are good at it, and some of us are bad.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-Security.html

**HAPPY2BME** · 03-29-2014, 09:19 AM

Obama denies promising Americans they could absolutely keep their healthcare plans, even though video shows him making that pledge - 29 times!

Obama suddenly pivoted Monday night, adding conditions to his pledge that no one would lose insurance plans that they liked
The Affordable Care Act requires policies to include a set of coverage items including maternity and pediatric care, whether or not people want it
As costs rise, insurance companies are issuing cancellation letters by the millions
The White House isn't offering apologies for the about-face, even though the left-of-center Washington Post found that Obama's 'if you like your plan, you can keep your plan' promise was a 'whopper' of a lie

By David Martosko, U.s. Political Editor
PUBLISHED: 18:42 EST, 5 November 2013 | UPDATED: 07:57 EST, 6 November 2013

Let me be perfectly clear ... I didn't mean it! Obama changed his rhetoric Monday night, backing off from his oft-repeated promise that no American would be forced to abandon his or her health insurance under Obamacare

President Barack Obama told cheering throngs in Washington, D.C. Monday night that he never truly promised Americans could keep their health insurance plans once his Affordable Care Act became law.

'If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it – if it hasn’t changed since the law passed,' he claimed.

'So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act, you're grandfathered in on that plan. But if the insurance company changes it, then what we're saying is they've got to change it to a higher standard.'

He remarks came at the posh St. Regis hotel during a meeting of Organizing For Action, the nonprofit pressure group that grew out of his presidential campaign organization Obama For America.

But at least 29 videotaped examples available online show Obama promising between 2008 and this year, in only slightly varied language, that 'if you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan, period.'
It wasn't until after the Obamacare program's central website had its disastrous launch, and millions of Americans began receiving insurance cancellation letters, that the White House took a new tack.

Means to an end: Obama is playing for his presidential legacy, and gambling that the Affordable Care Act will work out in the end; his throngs of fans don't seem bothered by word-parsing or repeated promises

'If you like your plan, and you like your doctor, you won't have to do a thing,' Obama said on June 23, 2009. 'You keep your plan'

More recently, the president and his press flacks have begun to insert into that promise the caveat that Obama uttered Monday: that Obamacare will only let Americans keep their existing insurance plans if nothing about them changes from year to year.

'If the insurance company changes it, then what we're saying is they've got to change it to a higher standard,' Obama told his fans at the St. Regis. 'They've got to make it better. They've got to improve the quality of the plan they are selling.'

The Affordable Care Act itself, however, requires all medical insurance plans sold in the U.S. to include a raft of minimum coverage benefits, a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn't appeal to many buyers.

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Pediatric coverage, maternity care and dental insurance, for instance, are options that the elderly, the single and the frugal have chosen not to pay for in previous years.

Requiring those additions, and seven others, have put millions of Americans with 'grandfathered' policies in the position of being forbidden to keep plans they have happily purchased and renewed for years.

One estimate has 2.5 million such cancellation letters already sent in the U.S., with a peak of 12 million or more expected by year's end.

In a January 2010 speech, Obama promised taxpayers that 'if you want to keep the health insurance you've got, you can keep it'

Game change: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was left holding the bag as Obamacare's online launch fell apart, and may keep catching spears for Obama as Americans become more frustrated with insurance cancellations

Some of the videotaped examples of Obama's campaign-style rhetoric are striking for their unqualified language.
During a June 15, 2009 speech at the American Medical Association's annual meeting, he pledged that 'no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. (If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period.'

On September 12 of that year, he told an Obamacare rally in Minneapolis that 'nothing in this plan requires you to change what you have if you're happy with it.'

Obama's January 27, 2010 State Of The Union address to Congress included the reassurance that 'our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.'

Speaking at George Mason University in suburban Virginia on March 27, 2010, he doubled down on that claim.
'If you like your doctor, you’re going to be able to keep your doctor,' Obama said, to strong applause. 'If you like your plan, keep your plan.'

'I don’t believe we should give government or the insurance companies more control over health care in America. I think it’s time to give you, the American people, more control over your health.'
His rhetoric got progressively more definitive as 2010 wore on.

'If you're happy with what you've got,' nobody's changing it,' the president said in September 2010, just weeks before that year's congressional midterm election

This man's Anthem BlueCross BlueShield policy was cancelled, and he was offered new insurance at nearly triple the price. He send this photo to MyCancellation.com

The president abruptly changed his promise on Monday, telling a friendly crown that 'If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it ¿ if it hasn¿t changed since the law passed'

On April 1 in Portland, Maine, Obama promised that 'if Americans like their doctor, they will keep their doctor. And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it.'

'No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. t won’t happen in the future.'

Later, during his October 12, 2012 presidential debate with Republican Mitt Romney, the president assured Americans that 'if you've got health insurance, [Obamacare] doesn't mean a government takeover. You keep your own insurance. You keep your own doctor.'

Cassandra complex (look it up): Rep. Tom Price floated his own health care bill in 2009 while insisting that Obama couldn't possibly keep his promises

Taken together, the Washington Post's fact-checker wrote last week, 'his repeated pledge ... is one of the most famous statements of his presidency.'

The Post gave it a dreaded 'four Pinocchios' rating for dishonesty, its worst grade. The paper says four-Pinocchio lies qualify as 'whoppers.'

'The president's statements were sweeping and unequivocal – and made both before and after the bill became law,' the Post ruled. 'The White House now cites technicalities to avoid admitting that he went too far.'

The Post noted, too, that Republicans were calling shenanigans on Obama's pledge as early as the first year of his presidency.
Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price, a medical doctor himself, proposed an alternative health care bill in 2009. During the Republican Party's weekly address on Aug. 24 of that year, Price claimed Obama wasn't playing it straight.

'On the stump, the president regularly tells Americans that "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,"' Price said. 'But if you read the bill, that just isn’t so.'

'For starters, within five years, every health care plan will have to meet a new federal definition for coverage – one that your current plan might not match, even if you like it.'

Obama is now calling those plans 'substandard,' and playing up his insurance law's aspiration to upgrade every policy, even at a sometimes significant cash price.

The website MyCancellation.com has collected dozens of insurance cancellations letters from Americans who have lost their policies. Most are being told to choose between renewing at more than twice the price, or casting their lot with the Obamacare federal health insurance exchange.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-29-times.html

**HAPPY2BME** · 03-29-2014, 09:55 AM

**HAPPY2BME** · 03-29-2014, 12:12 PM

“Americans who sign up for Obamacare will be getting a big surprise if they expect to access premium health care that may have been previously covered under their personal policies. Most of the top hospitals will accept insurance from just one or two companies operating under Obamacare.”

Obamacare Is a 'Haves and Have Nots' Health System

By Jacqueline Leo 23 hours ago

Obamacare Is a 'Haves and Have Nots' Health System

The rich have always been able to pay for the best doctors and medical care. But until now, that advantage had not been institutionalized by the federal government.

My first boss was a millionaire. I was one of his three secretaries, making a pittance and attending college at night. One night I fell leaving the subway while rushing to class. I didn’t think much of it until my boss noticed I was limping a little. He insisted that I see his orthopedic specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York — one of the most elite institutions of its kind.

The doctor fixed my hip, and my corporate insurance covered the cost. Over the years, as I worked for different companies and built my career, I passed on my top docs to people who worked with me. There was never a question about lower-paid employees affording a top doctor for a sick child or an elderly parent — or themselves.

Related: Hospitals Plot the End of Insurance Companies

Corporate insurance in those days was the great equalizer. I had what the CEO had, as did everyone in the mailroom. That “equalizer” is doomed with Obamacare. So says one of the chief architects of the president’s health care law, Ezekiel Emanuel. He told The New York Times that companies will move away from providing insurance and offer stipends for employees to buy insurance on the health care exchanges. Emanuel said the “Cadillac tax” imposed on high-cost full service plans will push companies to make that choice. “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance,” Emanuel told The Times.

Even now, as the bulging baby boom moves from private insurance to Medicare, more than 150 million Americans have employer-provided health insurance, not all of which, of course, is as generous as a Cadillac plan. Nevertheless, the unintended consequence of this move away from a “one-size fits all” corporate plan institutionalizes a health care system of “haves and have nots.” Why? If you have insurance through Obamacare, your odds of being accepted by one of the nation’s top hospitals or having access to top doctors is seriously diminished.

Watchdog.org, a conservative site, investigated how many of the nation’s top hospitals were opting out of Obamacare. They used the U.S. News and World Report list of best hospitals for 2013-14. “Americans who sign up for Obamacare will be getting a big surprise if they expect to access premium health care that may have been previously covered under their personal policies. Most of the top hospitals will accept insurance from just one or two companies operating under Obamacare,” Watchdog reported.

Related: More Companies Dump Employee Insurance for Obamacare

Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Massachusetts General in Boston are mandated to accept all insurance under state law. But Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, only accepts the Blue Cross silver plan. And the Cleveland Clinic only accepts Medical Mutual of Ohio. Like others, they have issues with the reimbursement rates under Obamacare.

“In many cases, consumers are shopping blind when it comes to what doctors and hospitals are including in their Obamacare exchange plans,” Josh Archambault, senior fellow with the think tank Foundation for Government Accountability, told Watchdog.org. “These patients will be in for a rude awakening once they need care, and get stuck with a big bill for going out-of-network without realizing it.”

Imagine you’re a new parent and your baby has a heart condition. You live in Seattle where Seattle Children’s Hospital has sued the state’s Office of Insurance for “failure to ensure adequate network coverage” through Obamacare. If you have insurance through one of the companies that isn’t accepted by Children’s, you’re out — or you have to pay the astonishing costs for access to their neo-natal care center. A hospital news release stated, “Children’s is the only pediatric hospital in King County and the preeminent provider of many pediatric specialty services in the Northwest.”

The result, of course, is that the nation’s high-end teaching hospitals — where the best research facilities and some of the best doctors in the world practice — will be mostly available to rich people. And perhaps just super rich people like Warren Buffett and the Koch Brothers. Clearly a paltry millionaire couldn’t afford more than a week at a NICU and still pay the mortgage on a Tribeca loft.

Related: Top Tier Hospitals Excluded from Obamacare

Still, we all know that corporate and private insurance before Obamacare wasn’t working, either. Premiums and deductibles were increasing at a rate almost as fast as college tuition. The president’s plan does something that corporate insurance was never able to do: make consumers actually shop for health care the way they would for any product or service.

The problem with the president’s plan is that you’re flying blind when you’re shopping. You don’t know if what you’re buying will really meet your needs or whether you will incur additional costs when you “implement” the plan.

More importantly, the administration doesn’t know what it will cost consumers or the economy either. I don’t believe President Obama lied when he repeatedly said you could keep your health insurance and your doctor. He simply didn’t know because he rolled out a plan without test-marketing one of the largest e-commerce plays ever and neither he nor anyone in the administration was prepared for the results.

One of those results reinforces a societal inequity that Obama wants to rectify — his Affordable Care Act creates a health system that leaves the “have nots” in the dust.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obamac...iacontentstory

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:

Obamacare Spells the End of Employer-Based Coverage
Yet Another Obamacare Glitch Was Just Discovered
Insurers on Obamacare: Expect Premium Prices to Soar

**southBronx** · 03-29-2014, 03:43 PM

Originally Posted by HAPPY2BME

Obama 'sucked less than Romney': Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a DEMOCRAT, uncorks a Nebraska-sized tornado on the president, slamming him for health care lies and saying he's not up to saving Social Security

Kerrey, a two-term Senator in the '80s and '90s, is disappointed in the president for risking the health of the U.S. economy over Obamacare
'He had to know he was misleading the audience,' he said of Obama's infamous 'If you like your health care plan' deception
Explains that an even bigger lie Democrats tell is that 'everybody' can get 'high-quality, affordable health care'
Obama, he says, lacks the courage to bring Democrats and Republicans together to save U.S. entitlement programs from bankruptcy
'If he was up to it, he would have done it,' Kerrey tells MailOnline