Thread: Oprah Abandons Ship… Refuses to Help Promote Obamacare

Oprah Abandons Ship… Refuses to Help Promote Obamacare

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Dean D Garrison



photo: Joe Crimmings Photography

At one time there were rumors that Barack Obama might actually pick Oprah Winfrey to be his Vice-Presidential running mate. Though the rumors proved to be a little on the absurd side (why would she take the pay cut?), one can understand why some people arrived at that conclusion. When Oprah Winfrey backs someone for President, it is not easy to overcome and it’s an endorsement worth its weight in gold. It is impossible to calculate her actual impact, but I think it would be fair to say that she won a lot of votes for Barack Obama in 2008. It has been estimated that 48 million people watch her show at least one time per week. To think that she may have influenced a million or more votes is not out of the question and may, in fact, be a conservative estimate.
Now, she is apparently looking to distance herself from the monster she helped create. She claims she doesn’t have time to meet with Barack Obama and has chosen to send a low-ranking proxy in her place.
The New York Post reports:

As the White House was gearing up to sell ObamaCare to the American people last summer, Valerie Jarrett, the president’s pointwoman on a host of issues, phoned Oprah Winfrey.
She invited the Queen of All Media to join celebrities, including Amy Poehler, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys, to meet with President Obama and discuss how they could generate publicity for his health-care law.
Oprah refused.
“All of Oprah’s top people thought she would go, because when the president invites you to the White House, most people automatically say yes,” said one of Oprah’s closest advisers. “But Oprah said she didn’t have the time or inclination to go. It wasn’t like she had to think it over. It was an immediate, flat-out, unequivocal no.”
Instead, Oprah sent a low-level rep from one of her talent agencies, which was regarded as a insult. Obama had been counting on Oprah’s immense persuasive powers to help enroll millions in ObamaCare. But as the rollout turned into a disaster, Oprah didn’t lift a finger to help.
The story of why Oprah has changed her tune and gone AWOL on ObamaCare goes well beyond mere gossip. It speaks volumes about the convergence of celebrity and politics under Obama and about a president who thinks nothing of using and then discarding his most loyal supporters.

Did she get her feelings hurt? Or is Oprah just smart enough to know that Obamacare is a trainwreck? I would suggest that the latter may be more true.
The same people who loved the idea, in the beginning, are now cursing the wretched beast known as The Affordable Care Act. Why would Oprah want any part of that?
Sure thing Mr. President.
I am sure Oprah will get right on that.
Oprah Winfrey is an ultra smart business woman. You can think what you want about her politics but there is no doubt that she knows how to make money.
Why would she risk losing viewers to keep supporting a losing team? If people stop watching her show then things change for her dramatically.
I would think it’s a simple business decision to cut her losses and move on.
Oprah may have come to the realization that she backed a bad horse. Why would she risk alienating viewers by continuing down that path?
So just move on Oprah. You are worth billions and I don’t blame you if you do. Enjoy your success and stay out of politics.
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Personally Oprah lost her credibility with me years ago she must be going for ratings on her show that no one watches...

Georgia Business to Dump Employees into Exchanges and Pay Fine

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Steven Ahle





Debbie and Larry Underkoffler, opened a boutique staffing agency in the middle of the Obama recession and have always taken good care of their employees, but thanks to Obamacare, they are forced into throwing them to the wolves. They have 400 temporary workers and want to add another 200 this year, but buying them all an Obamacare policy is too expensive and they have decided to pay the $2,000 fine for not providing coverage.

Although they only have 18 fulltime employees, under Obamacare rules, temporaries who work over 30 hours a week are eligible for coverage. That would take them to about 200 employees and put them over the top and into mandatory coverage.
The Onderkofflers worked hard to build up their business. “I would bake sourdough bread, and I made homemade strawberry jam, and deliver it to my prospects. I would also deliver homemade cookies.” And their 18 full-time employees get generous healthcare benefits, which they will now lose since Obamacare does not allow a company to have different policies between full-time workers and part-timers.
It looks like we will have to just pay the penalties.”
By paying the penalties, it will cost their business $400,000 a year which greatly diminish their profit margin, but not as badly as the 2 million it would cost to insure them. Some call this an unintended consequence of the law, but I submit that this is exactly what the law was designed to do and once everyone is in the government exchange, they will convert it to a single payer system, like the ones that work so well in Canada and Great Britain.
With a year’s delay in the employer mandate, they are hoping for some relief with the current rules but neither is optimistic.
“I haven’t seen any thus far. And certainly with the situation in Washington right now, they seem to be kicking the can down the road.”
Steven Ahle is the Editor of Red Statements.

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Get used to this folks this is just the beginning, lets all say thank you to Superman!!!

- Super Obama

Who Expected Premiums to Skyrocket with Obamacare? We Did!

Posted on October 18, 2013



Health Insurance will become almost useless for a lot of people.

Check it out:

This is the tip of the iceberg, by the way, on identity theft kind of fraud that’s going to happen in Obamacare. Here are a couple pull quotes: “As previously reported, TDCI implemented registration requirements and criminal background checks on people who serve as Obamacare navigators or certified Obamacare application counselors in Tennessee. Such people are responsible for handling the financial or medical information belonging to other individuals,” the navigators.

“Strangely, last month, mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post seemed to condemn Tennessee and other states for implementing these policies, saying they were getting in the way of progress. ‘There is a very palpable concern … that anti-Obamacare state government people will find ways to gum up the works,’ the Post quoted Leonardo Cuello, director of health reform for the National Health Law Program, as saying.”

So Tennessee, trying to keep fraud out of the system a couple weeks ago, was accused of trying to gum it up! Now, speaking of the navigators, we had a story from earlier this week. Headline: “Obamacare ‘Navigator’ Stormed GOP Official’s Property — A Kansas Obamacare ‘navigator’ stormed the property of the Republican secretary of state earlier this year… ‘It is shocking that the Obama administration has hired as a navigator a person who has been caught trespassing and attempting to intimidate a public official,’ Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach …

“‘This kind of thug activity is bad enough, but giving this person federal tax dollars is sickening,’ he added.” It is not “shocking,” is my point. It is not shocking that the regime would hire anti-Republican activists, pro-Obama activists as navigators to intimidate Republicans and others who seek to sign up with this thing. Here’s another one. This is New York Post: “Doctors Worried Sick Over Obamacare — New York doctors are feeling queasy about Obamacare — and many won’t participate in the new national insurance program because they fear they’ll go broke, The Post has learned.

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Surprise Surprise!!!!

Three Reasons Why The Website Problems Could Become A Total Disaster For Obamacare

Josh Barro Oct. 21, 2013, 10:35 AM




AP



On Monday morning, President Barack Obama will address problems with Healthcare.gov in a Rose Garden statement. The website, where residents of 36 states are supposed to be able to buy the health plans offered under the Affordable Care Act, has both frontend and backend problems. Anecdotal evidence suggests few consumers are successfully using it to buy health plans.
The White House has been trying to signal that it is working hard to fix the website problems while at the same time downplaying their significance. A White House official told Business Insider in an email:
He will remind the public that while these technical problems are unacceptable, the health care law is about much more than just a website — it’s about finally offering millions of Americans the health care security they deserve and giving new benefits and rights to those who have coverage today. The product — quality, affordable insurance — is good, and if anything, the interest and demand at the launch of HealthCare.gov proves just how urgently Americans want and need access to these new health care options.
This is the wrong tone to be striking. The problems with Healthcare.gov are a big, substantive problem for the Affordable Care Act and the president needs to explain to Americans when and how they will be fixed so his law can work as intended.
The distinction between the website and the "product" is illusory. Here are three key product problems that will arise if the Obama Administration cannot get the website working in short order.
1. People with existing individual-market insurance will have trouble maintaining coverage. About 14 million Americans currently get health insurance through private markets in individual health insurance, and many are getting notices that their existing health insurance policies are canceled effective December 31.
If Healthcare.gov were working well, this would be more or less fine: These people should be able to buy insurance through Obamacare's exchanges. Some will have to pay more, especially if they are young and healthy; others, such as those with low incomes or pre-existing conditions, will pay less.
But without access to the exchanges, these people are likely to end up with coverage gaps or accepting unappealing offers from their prior insurers. A friend of mine emailed me last week because Blue Cross is canceling his individual plan and offering him a new one that costs $70 more per month and has higher out-of-pocket costs.
Taking that private offer would deny him the opportunity to shop for cheaper plans in the exchange, and he also wouldn't be able to get a government subsidy toward his premium even if he qualifies for one. He lives in California, one of 14 states not using Healthcare.gov, so he will be able to shop on Covered California for a better deal. But if he lived in another state, he'd be in bad shape if Healthcare.gov isn't in working order by, say, December 1.

2. The individual mandate will become problematic. The individual mandate is essential to the functioning of insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act, which is why the Obama Administration has sharply resisted Republican efforts to delay it. But you can't hold people accountable for not buying a product that they aren't able to buy.
The Obama Administration has a few months to get ahead of this problem. The individual mandate becomes effective on January 1, 2014, but it includes exemptions for "short coverage gaps" of less than months. So long as the exchange website is up and running and most people are easily able to buy plans by Feb. 15, they won't get hit with penalties.
But if it's still not working by then, Obama will have to have a conversation with Congress about delaying the individual mandate.
3. There could be an insurance death spiral. If buying insurance remains very difficult but possible, it's likely that the small number of people who do buy will be disproportionately sick, which could lead to sharp rises in premiums in 2015 and beyond, causing more relatively healthy people to drop coverage, causing premiums to rise further and leading to the dreaded "insurance death spiral." Yuval Levin explains what health insurers are freaking out about:
One key worry is based on the fact that what they’re facing is not a situation where it is impossible to buy coverage but one where it is possible but very difficult to buy coverage. That’s much worse from their point of view, because it means that only highly motivated consumers are getting coverage. People who are highly motivated to get coverage in a community-rated insurance system are very likely to be in bad health. The healthy young man who sees an ad for his state exchange during a baseball game and loads up the site to get coverage — the dream consumer so essential to the design of the exchange system — will not keep trying 25 times over a week if the site is not working. The person with high health costs and no insurance will. The exchange system is designed to enable that sick person to get coverage, of course, but it can only do that if the healthy person does too. The insurers don’t yet have a clear overall sense of the risk profile of the people who are signing up, but the circumstantial evidence they have is very distressing to them. The danger of a rapid adverse selection spiral is much more serious than they believed possible this summer. They would love it if the administration could shut down the exchange system, at least the federal one, until the interface problems can be addressed. But they know this is impossible.
Again, this is a problem that becomes a really big deal only if Healthcare.gov continues to work poorly all the way into spring 2014; so long as the young and healthy people can sign up in the first three months of 2014, there will be time to catch up on enrollment even if the picture looks bad on January 1.
And there is one more reason to be hopeful this nightmare scenario won't materialize: Health insurers are eager to add tens of millions of new customers and have every reason to work to prevent a death spiral. Even if website problems that drag into 2014 cause the participant pool to be disproportionately sick, and insurers take a bath for one year, they will be motivated to price in a way that draws healthy participants in for 2015, so long as the website is working well by fall 2014, when 2015 enrollment starts.
Still, it would be best to avoid the problem altogether.
I hope the President today makes clear what the White House sees as the timeline for insurance signups: When they expect either the website or alternative signup channels to be in good working order; and what rules (if any) will have to be delayed to accommodate delayed signups.
Yes, there appears to be intense consumer interest in the products made available through the Affordable Care Act. That's great. Save the victory laps for after people are able to buy the products they're interested in.
CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this post said that consumers would need to purchase insurance by March. Consumers will need to buy insurance by Feb. 15 for their plans to be effective on March 1.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-t...#ixzz2iN6818BG

Obama care is a disaster for average Joe American, the end results will be very little health care and the best will continue to go to the wealthy. Control of health care is power over lives and money no more no less. The direction is a single payer system like some other countries, long waiting periods, rationing, fewer doctors and many of those will be foreign trained.

Obamacare Website Violates Licensing Agreement for Copyrighted Software

Posted on October 18, 2013

How could professional programmers makes such a huge mistake? This whole thing is beyond ridiculous.
Check it out:

Healthcare.gov, the federal government’s Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.
The script in question is called DataTables, a very long and complex piece of website software used for formatting and presenting data. DataTables was developed by a British company called SpryMedia which licenses the open-source software freely to anyone who complies with the licensing agreement. A note at the bottom of the DataTables.net website says: “DataTables designed and created by SpryMedia © 2008-2013.” The company explains the license for using the software on that website
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