Thread: MEDIA FIND OBAMACARE ENROLLEE, IGNORE HE'S AN OFA VOLUNTEER [UPDATE: HE DIDN'T ENROLL

MEDIA FIND OBAMACARE ENROLLEE, IGNORE HE'S AN OFA VOLUNTEER [UPDATE: HE DIDN'T ENROLL]



by BEN SHAPIRO 4 Oct 2013, 9:37 AM PDT 27 POST A COMMENT

Chad Henderson has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Huffington Post, and Politico, among others. He’s received 120 notifications on his phone. What makes Henderson so special? According to Henderson, he successfully enrolled in Obamacare. He posted on his Facebook, “Something major happened to me today. I get off of work and find that I have 120 new notifications on my phone. Come to find out….a few of President Obama’s top advisers had shared my ObamaCare enrollment story with their Twitter followers and I had received much positive feedback along with some hateful feedback.”

Organizing for Action, Henderson said, “contacted me and my story will be published along with a video interview on the President’s official advocacy website, Organizing for Action, and could possibly make it on the White House website.”
Henderson did not mention that he is an Organizing for Action volunteer. He was also an activist with the Democratic Party. A media report about Henderson from the Washington Post did not mention either of these facts, choosing instead to describe Henderson merely as “a student at Chattanooga State University who lives across the state border in Flintstone, Ga. (population: 3,456). He describes himself as a supporter of President Obama who has anxiously awaited Obamacare's rollout.”
UPDATE: Henderson now tells the Washington Post he didn't enroll after all. According to the Post's Sarah Kliff: "I spoke with Chad over the phone about this situation. He told me that he has indeed not purchased coverage but doesn't believe he was lying. He said he told reporters that he completed an application for coverage and knows what plan he would like to purchase, but has not, as of yet, enrolled in that insurance plan."

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journal...acare-Enrollee

MEET THE GUY WHO GOT HIS OBAMACARE ON DAY ONE



By: John Hayward
10/4/2013 09:20 AM

Move over, Dos Equis Guy! You’re no longer the Most Interesting Man in the World. The torch has been passed to the media’s new heartthrob, a young man named Chad Henderson who appears to be the only person in America who got signed up for ObamaCare on Day One.
That’s not much of an exaggeration, really, and it gives you a good idea why Administration flacks are suddenly claiming the billion-dollar ObamaCare computer system is a ridiculously outmoded hunk of junk that can’t produce launch-day enrollment figures for a month. Bear with them while they change a few blown vacuum tubes and feed some more punch cards into the system!
The national media went nuts trying to find someone they could use as the poster child for Launch Day. In state after state, there were reports of zero successful applicants… including Kansas, home state of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Reporters spoke of calling hundreds of people and finding no one who actually bought a policy from the ObamaCare exchanges.
Avik Roy at Forbes quoted an insurance industry source who said, “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange. We are talking single digits.” Roy found this unsurprising, noting that “two-thirds of the uninsured are America are under the age of 40,” and even if they had the patience to use the ridiculous hunk of junk the Administration blew all that tax money on – “What idiot put this system out there?”asked a disbelieving John McAfee, founder of the antivirus software company, predicting that identity thieves will have a field day with Obama’s crapware – the kids are going to recoil from the 60 percent, 90 percent, and even higher premium increases awaiting them. And that’s a big problem, because ObamaCare can only survive by turning young revenue targets upside down and shaking them until money falls out of their pockets.
Finding a young person who actually enrolled in ObamaCare was therefore a top priority for the White House press off… er, excuse me, the mainstream media. And they finally found one. One. Chad Henderson of Tennessee put an “Enrolled in ObamaCare!” notice on his Facebook page, and soon White House advisers just happened to notice it – shazam! – and pass it along to the media, which formed a comical dogpile at Henderson’s doorstep.
“I’ve now been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Huffing post, Enroll America, and Politico,” bubbled Henderson, who adores the latter website so much that he rendered its name as “POLITICO!!” He also announced a press conference call with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and several local media outlets.
What a breathtaking rush of media and official attention! And it all started when this entirely random, perfectly average, politically unconnected, I-am-so-NOT-a-prop young man put up a Facebook post that was almost instantly spotted by people at the White House. Okay, maybe they had some help from the NSA. Anyway, Chad couldn’t be happier, squealing that he accepts all those media interview requests “with honor, knowing that I am helping the President make history by bringing out the facts on ObamaCare!!”
Wow, you couldn’t ask for more enthusiasm from an Obama For America volunteer!
Funny thing: it turns out Chad Henderson is an Obama For America volunteer. It’s called “Organizing For Action” these days, having magically changed from Barack Obama’s campaign apparatus into a totally non-partisan operation, which the IRS couldn’t wait to give one of those wonderful tax exemptions, to help them pursue such non-partisan activities as running Barack Obama’s official Twitter feed. The only way this story could get funnier would be the revelation that Chad Henderson is one of the people who puts out Twitter messages under Obama’s name.
It took the multiple layers of editorial fact-checking at our vaunted mainstream media a long time to discover this rather relevant affiliation. (Try to imagine an equivalent scenario, in which a young Republican political activist was touted by a swarm of major media organizations as the poster child for a Republican program, without efforts to vet his political connections.)
Henderson himself seems like a pleasant, earnest fellow, who insists his OFA volunteer work is not relevant to his opinion of ObamaCare, which is not actually unalloyed praise. He told the Daily Caller he could “see why someone would give up instead of waiting for a long time” to use the ObamaCare system, adding that “something needs to be fixed on the website for sure.” But he’s also either dishonest or incredibly naive to keep insisting he was a randomly selected young “success story” who just happened to pop up on the Administration’s radar because he wrote a Facebook post and sent out a Tweet.
To any rational person, his story is a powerful argument for ObamaCare repeal. A multi-billion-dollar system, pushed with a billion-dollar propaganda slush fund and massive celebrity endorsements for months, and intensive searches by both our bloated Administration and enormous pro-Obama media could only turn up one satisfied customer? That’s an unmitigated disaster of cosmic proportions. Our Founding Fathers would wonder why we aren’t bringing Obama’s people up on charges to find out where all the money went. Well, okay, they would have died of shame and horror when they found out how ObamaCare worked, and how it was rammed through Congress, but since we’re already raising them from the grave to get their take on the Chad Henderson story, we can resurrect them more than once, especially seeing as how it’s getting close to Halloween.
Henderson isn’t literally the only young person who bought into ObamaCare, despite his absurdly high media profile. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal found another one: 30-year-old law student Brendan Mahoney. He already had a reasonably priced insurance plan, but he plugged into the ObamaCare exchange… and it put him on Medicaid, where taxpayers will cover his freight until he can comfortably settle into his six-figure career.
Taranto concludes, “So the great success story of ObamaCare’s first day is the transformation of a future lawyer who was already paying for insurance into a welfare case.”


http://www.humanevents.com/2013/10/0...re-on-day-one/