Thread: Harry Reid: More funding needed to prevent ObamaCare from becoming train wreck

Kerry promises $123 million to Syrian jihadists fighting Assad

No Mo Money Harry and Kerry

ObamaCare Imploding

Okay folks, I know you think the C-Span Channel that broadcasts all those Congressional hearings is boring, but, really, you should have been around to watch the Senate Finance Committee's hearing Wednesday on the Affordable Health Care Insurance Oversight.

Folks, you haven't seen so many faces of misery since you watched Les Miserable for three and a half hours...and they were all Democrats. And one of them, Senator Max Baucus, was the primary sponsor of Obamacare in the Senate!

Now, try to follow me here because this gets pretty complicated. (It seems that Nancy Pelosi was right; you DO have to pass Obamacare to find out what's in it...and the Democrats are now learning what the Republicans warned them about. It's an unworkable mess that is throwing millions of Americans off the health care rolls!)

Okay, apparently, tens of thousands of American employers began throwing workers off their health care plans and opting to pay the much lower federal fine for not offering health care for their workers. Thousands more are even now converting their full time workers to part time workers by limiting working hours per week to less than 30, in compliance with Obamacare rules. (Remember when Paul Ryan and the Republicans predicted employers would do this? Remember when Democrats were warned that employers would move to save operating expenses by moving their entire work force into federal healthcare exchanges?)

Now, these workers who have lost their health care benefits are busy trying to sign up for state health care exchanges. (There are Internet sites available if your state has agreed to sign up to Obamacare). However, when these American workers, soon to be without employee provided health care, go to the Health Exchange to sign up, they are finding they are not qualified! It seems that during the signup process, applicants are required to fill in various income and benefit data, which then flows over to IRS computers who then are to spit out what your premium costs will be and how much federal tax credits you'll receive in order to receive subsidies to help you afford health care premiums that are as much as 30% more than you were paying under your employer's plan!

Big Problem! The IRS is only allowing somewhere around 9% subsidy support for Obamacare Health care Exchange premiums that are priced so much higher than the worker was paying under his employer plan! (Surprise, Surprise! Remember Republicans warning that forcing working Americans to pay for the 30 million leaches who pay nothing for their health care under Medicaid would drive the premiums of working Americans higher?)

Second Big Problem! The IRS computers won't mate up with the Health Care Exchange computers because the IRS computer system is obsolete! So when workers try to sign up for Obamacare the IRS and the Health Exchanges are telling applicants to go to pound sand!

And so fireworks really broke out at the Finance Committee hearings on Obamacare yesterday afternoon. Senator Max Baucus, (Dem), said.. "How could this happen? I'm hearing from my constituents that they and their families have been left out in the cold and are without health care because the Exchanges are not accepting them!" Quote from Senator Bill Nelson, (Dem), Florida "my constituents are not going to be happy to hear this administration failed to implement the necessary changes to accommodate health care applicants...someone has to pay for this!" Similar outrage was professed by Senator Ron Wyden (Dem) from Oregon.

Sadly, Obama Program Director for the Health care Affordability Act was on hand to lend testimony. All he could seem to do was sympathize with his Democratic buddies, saying that maybe the problems could be ironed out by the end of 2014 but could offer no ideas about how that could be done.

An Update! This morning a Harvard economics professor came on CNBC and announced that, according to a federal study his group just completed, the Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, is going to be forced to come back to this same committee, hat in hand, and request $700 billion dollars m ore be allocated to Obamacare just to pay for those automatically covered under current federal programs.

Also, sadly, the Wall Street Journal reported that, in addition to the 30 million Americans not currently covered under Obamacare, we can expect tens of millions more who will be left in the "no health care Twilight Zone"; those who were doing just fine with their employee health care plan until Obamacare was implemented this year. And many of those who were working 40 hour weeks will find themselves deemed "part time employees" working less than 30 hours per week and unable to afford Obama's premiums even if they could get through the application process.

And, as usual, while the working poor and the rapidly declining middle class will be out i n the cold without any health care, the Medicaid/Welfare leaches have no worry. They are covered by that $700 billion dollar pot of gold that Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services will be demanding from Congress soon!

Train Wreck Ahead

A Commentary by John Stossel
in Political Commentary
Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Most Americans -- even those who are legislators -- know very little about the details of President Obama's Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare. Next year, when it goes into effect, we will learn the hard way.

Many people lazily assume that the law will do roughly what it promises: give insurance to the uninsured and lower the cost of health care by limiting spending on dubious procedures.

Don't count on it.

Consider just the complexity: The act itself is more than 906 pages long, and again and again in those 906 pages are the words, "the Secretary shall promulgate regulations ..."
"Secretary" refers to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Her minions have been busy. They've already added 20,000 pages of rules. They form a stack 7 feet high, and more are to come.

Our old health care system was already a bureaucratic and regulatory nightmare. It had 16,000 different codes for different ailments. Under our new, "improved" system, there will be more than a 100,000.

Government likes to think regulations can account for every possibility. Injured at a chicken coop? The code for that will be Y9272. Fall at an art gallery? That means you are a Y92250. There are three different codes for walking into a lamppost -- depending on how often you've walked into lampposts. This is supposed to give government a more precise way to reimburse doctors for treating people and alert us to surges in injuries that might inspire further regulation.

On Government-Planned World, this makes sense. But it will be no more successful than Soviet central planning.

Compare all that to a tiny part of American medicine that is still free-market: Lasik eye surgery.

Its quality has improved, while costs dropped 25 percent. Lasik (and cosmetic surgery) are specialties that provide a better consumer experience because they are a market. Patients pay directly, so doctors innovate constantly to please them. Lasik doctors even give patients their cellphone numbers.

President Obama didn't kill American free-market health care. It began dying during World War II, when government imposed wage and price controls. At first, companies said, "Great, stability!" But then they realized that they could not attract better workers without raises. So companies got around the rules, as companies do. They gave "benefits," like health insurance.

Government then distorted the market further by giving employer-based health insurance better tax treatment than coverage you buy yourself.

But employer-based insurance is nuts. Many workers feel locked into their jobs. Company insurance largely destroyed the health care free market, since employees rarely shop for the best service at the lowest price.

Now Obamacare may kill what's left of that market.

Maybe we will soon be like Canada, where some people wait years for treatment. A producer from my TV show went to a Canadian town where the town clerk pulls names out of a box and then phones people to say: "Congratulations! You get to see a doctor this month!"

But there is at least one area where Canada offers cutting-edge, life-saving technologies. Unfortunately, to get this care, you have to meow or bark. Veterinary care is still handled by the market. Providers innovate or go out of business.

Markets find ways to make things better and cheaper. Obamacare often forbids that. For example, it requires that every insurance policy cover preventive care and "breastfeeding support." It insists that mammograms and colonoscopies be provided without any deductible.

It's tempting to believe that such rules prevent illness and save money, but there is little evidence they will. Some people will undergo invasive procedures that shorten lives instead of extending them. Some of us want those tests; some don't. Government controlled medicine means we all get them and pay for them, regardless of whether we want them. Government control kills consumer choice.

Lucky Lasik and cosmetic surgery patients! Their treatments are better in part because government doesn't consider them important enough to subsidize and regulate. If only government would neglect the rest of health care! Then we'd have better service and better care at lower cost.

And we'd have choices.

John Stossel is host of "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of "No They Can't: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed."

COPYRIGHT 2013 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
See Other Political Commentary
See Other Commentary by John Stossel

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/publ...in_wreck_ahead

Reid: More Funding Needed To Prevent Health Care Law From Becoming "Train Wreck"

If you missed it: Earlier this week Sen. Reid said he could fix the Obamacare "Train Wreck"....by spending even more of your money!

ObamaCare Heading for a “Train Wreck”

by Phyllis Schlafly on May 9, 2013

ObamaCare was supposed to be a big success by now, according to predictions made by liberals who railroaded it through Congress in 2010. Instead, as admitted by one of its leading architects, Democratic Senator Max Baucus, it’s heading for a “train wreck” later this year.

Baucus’s apt metaphor is being echoed by other Democrats because it is so obviously true. Harry Reid said, “I agree with him”; Senator Jay Rockefeller described it as “so complicated” that it’s “beyond comprehension”; Henry Chao, the government’s chief technical officer in charge of implementing the exchanges, said “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”

The outcry over the length of the 21-page application form (with a 61-page instruction manual) resulted in a cosmetic shortening. The same nosy questions are now asked on three separate forms (of 3, 5, and 12 pages) plus three appendices, plus a requirement that families with more than one child must “make a copy of pages 4 and 5 and complete” for each additional child.

Most states have repudiated key aspects of this misguided law, with the result that our nation is divided between about 16 “ObamaCare states” and 34 states that respect individual liberty. Every state in the South, from Virginia through Texas, has rejected a central part of ObamaCare by declining to increase its Medicaid rolls, despite the promise of massive federal handouts.

The official name of ObamaCare is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but this law is turning out to be neither protective of patients nor affordable. The American public was promised that we could keep our insurance and physicians, but in fact many millions will lose their health insurance and access to their own physicians.

Several Republican Governors caved in to pressure by the media and the hospital industry to embrace the costly Medicaid expansion, but then they were embarrassed by their own Republican State Legislatures which rejected this boondoggle. Medicaid spends billions on administrative costs and only a small percentage on quality medical care, so this inefficient program should be trimmed not expanded.

ObamaCare is causing reductions in hours worked and paychecks for many Americans as businesses seek to reduce their ObamaCare penalties by decreasing the number of employees who work 30 hours or more a week. Companies having at least 50 fulltime-equivalent employees must purchase expensive health insurance or else pay $2,000 or more in fines for each employee who works at least 30 hours a week.

Many businesses have decided to pay these fines rather than buy costly insurance for services, such as abortion-inducing drugs, that they do not even want. Government-approved health insurance policies will not cover many of the services that people can buy now with their own Health Savings Accounts.

ObamaCare’s much-publicized health insurance exchanges, supposedly designed to make insurance more affordable, have been a bust. Two-thirds of states have declined to set up exchanges, and taxpayer costs for them have ballooned to $5.7 billion for the federal government to establish them.

It seems doubtful that the Obama Administration will comply with ObamaCare by the date it is scheduled to become fully effective, January 1, 2014. At a news conference last week, President Obama failed to reassure us by making this clueless comment, “Anytime you’re implementing something big, there’s going be people who are nervous and anxious about ‘is it going to get done?’ until it’s actually done.”

Headlines proclaim the stock market’s new record highs, but the average American paycheck and fringe benefits are lagging far behind due to ObamaCare. ObamaCare is causing retail stores to reduce hours (and paychecks) for their employees at the fastest rate in more than 30 years, in order to avoid ObamaCare penalties.

While politicians brag that employment has increased by 1 percent over the last year in retail, the total hours worked has actually fallen by 0.9 percent during that same period. Employee fringe benefits in the service sector fell sharply in the first quarter for the first time in more than a decade.

A significant portion of the increase in overall employment is in temporary workers who are increasingly used by businesses to reduce ObamaCare’s penalties. ObamaCare is causing a shift in private employment to less desirable temporary jobs and jobs of shorter hours.

Many young people who voted for Obama are in for a surprise when they realize how much ObamaCare will cost them. College students in New Jersey face an increase in insurance costs from a few hundred dollars annually to $1,700 or more, so Democrats have rushed to repeal a New Jersey law that requires college students to buy health insurance.

A narrow vote in the U.S. Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare last summer by calling it a tax, even though Americans were repeatedly told by Democrats that it was not a tax. As bad as new taxes are, this ObamaCare train wreck is even worse than a tax.

Tell Congress to PASS Sen. Ted Cruz’ “Obamacare Repeal Act!” Sign the Petition!
Tagged as: obamacare, obamacare is unmanageable, obamacare law, obamacare trainwreck


About Phyllis Schlafly

Phyllis Schlafly is a national leader of the pro-family movement and a nationally syndicated columnist; she is also the author of Feminist Fantasies. Schlafly runs Eagle Forum.

View all posts by Phyllis Schlafly →




http://www.conservativeactionalerts....a-train-wreck/

hahahahahahaahahaha

Breaking News From Newsmax.com

Obamacare ‘Cadillac’ Tax to Hike Costs for Standard Plans