Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY): Yeah, "We All Knew" Obama Was Lying About Keeping Your Health Insurance

Guest post by TruthRevolt

New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand admitted Sunday to knowing the promises President Obama made about his signature health care plan were false. On ABC’s This Week, fill-in host Martha Raditz asked Gillibrand, considering the now nearly universally acceptance of the fact that the President said things about the law that weren’t true, whether she felt misled by the President:

He should’ve just been more specific. Because the point is, if you’re being offered a terrible health care plan, that the minute you get sick you’re going to have to go into bankruptcy, those plans should never be offered.

Following up on an obvious non-answer, Raditz asked again about being misled. This time, Gillibrand offered a startling revelation:

He should’ve just been specific. No we all knew. The whole point of the plan is to cover things people need, like preventive care, birth control, pregnancy. How many women, the minute they get pregnant, might risk their coverage. How many women paid more because of their gender, because they might get pregnant. Those are the reforms.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

OH, MY: It would appear administration officials Henry Chao and Marilyn Tavenner lied under oath to Congress

Mr. Peabody, set the Wayback Machine to July 17, 2013, please. Let's review testimony before the House Oversight Committee by Obama administration officials regarding the October 1st launch of Healthcare.gov.

With the NSA’s phone call monitoring and Edward Snowden on many minds, it’s not exactly a comfortable time for the government to roll out a massive computer project dealing with personal data like income, Social Security numbers and ethnicity.

But Henry Chao, a lead technology information officer from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said officials have completed about 80 percent of the safeguards to protect privacy when the agency rolls out what it calls “The Hub.” ... “It is important to understand that the hub is not a database; it does not retain or store information,” said Marilyn Tavenner, the CMS administrator, during a heated congressional hearing Wednesday.

She and Chao said the agency will complete the required tests and meet privacy regulations by Oct. 1, when health exchanges are scheduled to open. Their comments came in testimony to the House subcommittee on energy policy, health care and entitlements, which is part of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee...

Tuck the date of 17 July 2013 away. Now let's review some email traffic flying around Chao's office less than two weeks prior to that pair's testimony.

In emails from July, released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Obama administration officials write of unskilled developers and a series of missed deadlines. One email said the "entire build is in jeopardy." But when the administration's top people in charge of the implementation testified before the committee in the months leading up to the site launch, they said just the opposite — that they were ready...

• The only developer who was working on the payment pages for enrollment quit CGI without programming the 10 key user interface pieces of the transaction part. "Needless to say it is in jeopardy," wrote CMS' Jeffrey Grant.


• The part of the system that does monthly payment calculation of insurance plans did not get priority by the contractor, who called it "not an October 1 item." (The health care insurance website launched Oct. 1.)

• "Seriously substandard staffing," is how Grant described its contractor's people power. The key contractor, CGI, missed deadlines due to "insufficient" programmer resources. A month from testing certain parts of the system, no development work had even started.

When informed by Grant of the complete unraveling of the project, Chao was in denial.


There's government-quality management for you: instead of trying to get to the bottom of Grant's dire status report, Chao instead sought to "refute" it.

In other words, Chao and Tavenner were well aware that all of the site's testing -- not just the penetration and other security tests -- all of the site's tests were in dire jeopardy.

Contempt of Congress, anyone?

As I asked about Benghazi, and Fast and Furious, and IRS-gate: where the hell is the Select Investigative Committee? That's the only way we'll get to the bottom of these unprecedented assaults on the Constitution by the most lawless administration in modern American history.


Hat tip: BadBlue Real-Time News Service.

Friday, November 15, 2013

HEADLINE O' THE DAY: ClusterCare

The implosion is real, and it's spectacular:


Mark Steyn has the details.


POTUS was right about one thing: Obamacare really did bend the health care cost-curve...

...just the wrong way.


Note this graph doesn't yet include the big changes that will take place on January 1st.  But what we are already seeing I think qualifies as another promise broken by President Obama.  During his press conference yesterday, President Obama again attacked insurance companies, blaming them for any future problems with Obamacare.
And -- and so what we want to do is to be able to say to these folks, you know what, the Affordable Care Act is not going to be the reason why insurers have to cancel your plan. Now, what folks may find is the insurance companies may still come back and say, we want to charge you 20 percent more than we did last year, or we're not going to cover prescription drugs now. But that will -- that's in the nature of the market that existed earlier. . . .
The data is available from the "CPI-U News Release Companion File" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.

Oh, and then there's this: Revealed: Obamacare plans will cost MORE 'in many cases' even with government subsidies, officials admit for the first time.


Hat tip: BadBlue Guns.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

BLOODSPORT: The Health Insurance Industry Is Now Locked In A Death Struggle With The Democrat Party...

Guest post by The Hayride

...and only one of the two will survive.

Understand this: the health insurance industry is very much to blame for Obamacare. The health insurance industry happily got naked and jumped into the sack with Obama on his health insurance scheme. They did so thinking that he would leave them a fat, sweaty wad of cash on the night table in the form of forcing everybody in the country to buy their products, and in the process he would make them something akin to a public utility with a pre-ordained profit margin.

Except something happened on the way to conjugal bliss; namely, the president and his minions proved to be a bit flaccid when it came to providing the means by which they would release a torrent of customers to the insurers. The Healthcare.gov website is notoriously impotent, and the health insurance industry finds itself unsated.

Further, Obama is in no position to leave any money by the bedside. In fact, he’s sneaking out of the house before sunrise. And what’s more, he and his friends are about to blame the whole failed escapade on the health insurance business, after warning them to keep their trap shut about his wilting lily.

Obama – and the rest of the Democrat Party – is now embracing the idea of resurrecting the insurance policies his law killed, since so far the effect of Obamacare has been to turn 5 million Americans into uninsured while signing up 100,000 for his new exchanges. But those policies can’t be resurrected; it’s a logistical and economic nightmare to do so. Three years ago it would have been possible to provide for current insurance plans to survive, but on October 1 they died. The bodies, in most cases, have already been buried.

And Obama and the Democrats know this. The Landrieu plan? Obama’s “administrative fix” he announced today? Pure window dressing. They’re not quite as stupid as they sound in thinking that resuscitating a business model they killed can happen within a matter of weeks. Landrieu’s plan is even more ridiculous – not only does she think she can resuscitate that business model, she wants to command that it happen. Maybe she’s that stupid, maybe she’s not – but all of her fellow Democrats now signing on to that idea aren’t that moronic.

CONFIRMED: Democrat Utopia of Chicago On Road To Detroit-Style Financial Collapse

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Fiscal Disaster: A major credit rating agency has just given Chicago, with more general obligation debt per capita than Detroit, its second triple-notch downgrade in six months. Its bonds are perilously close to junk status.

Citing skyrocketing pension costs and a lack of meaningful solutions, Fitch Ratings lowered Chicago's debt to A- from AA- last week, making it the second serious downgrade since July.

The move by Fitch follows a triple downgrade of Chicago's bond rating by Moody's Investors in mid-July.

Moody's cited the city's "very large and growing" pension liabilities and "significant" debt service payments, among other factors.

The steady financial decline of the nation's third-largest city prompted us in early August to say Chicago was well on its way to becoming the next Detroit, a bankrupt monument to the perils of Democratic governance, a one-party Democratic town in arguably the bluest of blue states. And Chicago's mayor, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, learned financial discipline at the feet of the master — President Obama.

Like the president, Emanuel could claim he inherited the city's financial mess from his predecessor, but that would require blaming another Democratic mayor, Richard J. Daley.

Interestingly, Democratic governance is a common thread running through America's urban problems.

As the Chicago Tribune noted in its recent report on the problem, "Broken Bonds," Chicago's outstanding debt on general obligation bonds has quadrupled during the past 18 years, reaching $7.2 billion last year.

With interest, that amount nearly doubles. The city has more general obligation debt per capita than any of the 10 largest U.S. cities except New York.

The Tribune noted that Chicago leaders have routinely used bond proceeds to make interest payments on the bonds themselves, borrowing more than $450 million since 2000 just to pay interest. Some 63% of all property taxes went to debt payments last year.

A large part of Chicago's problem — the game of maintaining standing armies of campaign workers by overpromising and underfunding pensions — is now over.

PAUL KRUGMAN BEKLOWNS HIMSELF #6,336: Obamacare Edition

Economedian Paul Krugman has a unique, Nostradumbass-like talent for making the worst possible predictions at the worst possible times. Case in point (via American Digest's Ka-Ching Tumblr):


New York Times resident dumbass, Paul Krugman, from his article titled: Obamacare Is the Right’s Worst Nightmare in July, 2013. (via talkstraight and via stuff-that-irks-me)

As an aside, has anyone seen Krugman since Niall Fergusson pimp-slapped the troll-sized Times mascot into Westchester County?


President announces fix for Obamacare: HHS to build time machine, set date back to 9/30 and uncancel policies

Citing widespread concern with the rollout of his signature health care plan, President Obama today announced a project by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to "uncancel as many as 5 million insurance policies".

"Today I directed HHS Prime Minister Kathleen Sebelius to create a time machine," Obama stated during a hurriedly arranged press conference.

"While we understand that insurance companies won't necessarily be able to offer the insurance plans they did prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the HHS time machine should take care of that problem. By reversing the flow of time and setting the date back to September 30, 2013, we will prevent the rollout of Obamacare."


Artist's depiction of President Obama using TimeBoy™ 2000 device

An initial demonstration of a prototype HHS time machine, built by many of the same engineers who created the ill-fated Healthcare.gov website, was an embarrassing failure this afternoon.

In a packed press room at the Capitol Hyatt, Press Secretary Jay Carney was transformed into a half-fly, half-unicorn-like creature. Capitol Police escorted the Carney-corn to the D.C. Zoo for observation.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stated that the demonstration was successful and that Americans would enjoy their new hybrid bodies when the "final solution for health care was fully deployed."


Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

EXPERTS: Obscure Obamacare provision "gives people the green light to commit fraud"

Guest post by Tori Richards

Tucked inside nearly 11,000 pages of the Affordable Care Act is a little-known provision that doles out three months of free health care to individuals who choose to default on their premiums.

People who receive the federal subsidy to be part of Obamacare will be allowed to incur a three-month “grace period” if they can’t pay their premiums and then simply cancel their policies, stiffing the doctors and hospitals.

Their only repercussion is that they have to wait until the following year’s open enrollment if they want coverage on the exchange.

“It will help break the system,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, one of a core group of Republicans who oppose Obamacare. “This is a huge piece of evidence to show this can’t work, you will break the system and bankrupt people involved.

“The hospitals, doctors and insurance companies will be left holding the bag. There will be disagreements over who will pay for what. Lawyers will get involved because we are talking about a lot of money,” he said.

Under Section 156.270 of the Affordable Care Act, the insured needs to pay a premium for just one month before qualifying for the three-month grace period. The insurance company must pay the claims during the first month of the grace period; during the second and third month doctors and hospitals are left to collect unpaid bills.

This loophole wasn’t lost on some unnamed individuals who queried the Department of Health and Human Services during an open comment period for the new law in 2011.

While officials at HHS did not respond to requests for comment on this story, they did offer a glimpse into their thinking in a March 27, 2012, report contained in the Federal Register.

“HHS will continue to explore options for incentivizing appropriate use of the grace period,” the register said. “HHS will monitor this issue moving forward and will continue to work on the development of policies to prevent misuse of the grace period.”

Experts say the federal government has given people the green light to commit fraud.

THE GENIUS OF DEMOCRAT GOVERNANCE: Chicago's Detroitification Continues Apace

Guest post by Ted Dabrowski

Triple-notch credit downgrades for government entities are supposed to be rare.

They normally happen only in response to major financial events, such as a sudden fiscal emergency.

But Chicago just received its second triple-notch downgrade in just six months. And that spells trouble for Chicago taxpayers.

Citing skyrocketing pension costs and a lack of meaningful solutions, Fitch Ratings lowered the city of Chicago’s debt to A- from AA- last week. That’s just four notches away from junk-bond status.

Fitch’s downgrade comes on the heels of Moody’s Investors Service’s triple-notch downgrade of Chicago in July, prompted by the agency’s new methodology that nearly doubles the city’s official pension shortfall to $36 billion.

But Fitch didn’t just take Chicago’s credit rating down one notch — they hit Chicago with a triple-notch downgrade. Why?

Fitch Analyst Arlene Bohner said Chicago is approaching an “inflection point where inaction on pension reform will negatively impact the city’s finances and threaten to crowd out spending on city services.”

The city has already shuttered nearly 50 schools in the Chicago Public Schools system. And rather than hiring more police to battle crime, the city is resorting to paying overtime for existing officers. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has warned that property taxes will double if no real pension solution is found.

Fitch agrees. It says that if the city were to properly fund its pension system, city property taxes would “rise a dramatic 136%.”

So far, the Illinois General Assembly’s only response to the pension crisis was to pass a pension “fix” for the Chicago Park District. That fix calls for a tax hike on city residents, forces workers to keep paying into a broken system and does nothing to change the way the city runs retirements for its city workers.

Make no mistake: this bill is bad for city workers and taxpayers and will only perpetuate the problem.

There’s only one real way to change the rating agencies’ outlook on Chicago. And that’s to end defined benefit pensions and move to a system in which workers control their own retirements.


Read more at Illinois Policy Institute

Monday, November 11, 2013

WAPO: Administration So Desperate It's Now Reduced to Lying About How to Count Obamacare Enrollees

WonkBlog, of all places, spotlights yet another complete fabrication on the part of the geniuses behind Obamacare.

The fight over how to define the new health law’s success is coming down to one question: Who counts as an Obamacare enrollee?

Health insurance plans only count subscribers as enrolled in a health plan once they’ve submited a payment. That is when the carrier sends out a member card and begins paying doctor bills.


When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.

“In the data that will be released this week, ‘enrollment’ will measure people who have filled out an application and selected a qualified health plan in the marketplace,” said an administration official, who requested anonymity to frankly describe the methodology.

The disparity in the numbers is likely to further inflame the political fight over the Affordable Care Act. Each side could choose a number to make the case that the health law is making progress or failing miserably.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, said insurance companies have received about 50,000 private health plan enrollments through HealthCare.gov. Even combined with state tallies, the figure falls far short of the 500,000 sign-ups the administration initially predicted for both private sign-ups and those opting for the expansion of Medicaid.

This is simply more fraud.

If Amazon attempted to tell its shareholders that sales included items left un-purchased in visitors' shopping baskets, they'd probably be subject to criminal and civil penalties.

But big government seems to be above the law.


Comic Book Checklist Perfectly Describes Democrat Luddites' Anti-Technology Hysteria

Remember when President Obama blamed ATM machines and the Internet for persistent, high unemployment?

Good times, good times.

Anyhow, xkcd perfectly captures the idiocy of the Luddites who can't understand that since the dawn of recorded history, scientific and industrial advances have raised the average standard of living, not lowered it.


Apparently you have to be an economic illiterate to join the Democrat Party.


Sunday, November 10, 2013

Shapiro: No Way to Fix Obamacare

Guest post by TruthRevolt

Appearing on The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson on Fox News, TruthRevolt Editor-in-Chief blasted Democrat-sponsored legislation that would purport to retroactively grandfather in insurance plans people like under Obamacare. “The fact is,” Shapiro said, “somebody has to pay for the people who have pre-existing conditions in order for Obamacare to work. And those people have to be young and have to be healthy, and they also have to be folks who have to be kicked off their regular insurance in order to be forced into the more expensive Obamacare exchanges.”

Shapiro continued, “There is no way to amend this….It’s absurd. There’ s no possible way you can remove the central plank of what Obamacare constitutes, and that is redistribution of the payment schedule.”


Hat tip: BadBlue News

The Subprime Final Solution

Guest post by Jim Quinn

The MSM did their usual spin job on the consumer credit data released earlier this week. They reported a 5.4% increase in consumer debt outstanding to an ALL-TIME high of $3.051 trillion. In the Orwellian doublethink world we currently inhabit, the consumer taking on more debt is seen as a constructive sign. Consumer debt has grown by 5.8% over the first nine months of 2013, after growing by 6.1% in 2012 and 4.1% in 2011.

The storyline being sold by the corporate MSM propaganda machine, serving the establishment, is that consumers’ taking on debt is a sure sign of economic recovery. They must be confident about the future and rolling in dough from their new part-time jobs as Pizza Hut delivery men. Plus, they are now eligible for free healthcare, compliments of Obama, once they can log-on.

Of course, buried at the bottom of the Federal Reserve press release and never mentioned on CNBC or the other dying legacy media outlets is the facts and details behind the all-time high in consumer credit. They count on the high probability the average math challenged American has no clue regarding the distinction between revolving and non-revolving credit or who controls the distribution of such credit. It is fascinating examining the historical data on the Federal Reserve website and realizing how far we’ve fallen as a society in the last 45 years.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/HIST/cc_hist_sa_levels.html

Revolving credit is a fancy term for credit card debt. Imagine our society today without credit cards. That sounds outrageous to the debt addicted populace inhabiting our suburban wasteland and urban badlands. What is truly outrageous is the fact we have allowed ourselves to be duped into $846 billion of revolving credit card debt charging an average interest rate of 13% by Wall Street bankers who have used the American Dream of a better life as the bait to lure a dumbed down easily manipulated populace into believing that material possessions purchased with high interest debt represented advancement rather than servitude. Debt accumulation is seen as a badge of honor. Keeping up with the Joneses is all that matters. Our shallow culture has no notion about the concept of deferred gratification or saving to pay for your wants.

A shocking fact (to historically challenged government educated drones) revealed by the Federal Reserve data is that credit card debt did not exist prior to 1968. How could people live their lives without credit cards? It must have been a nightmare. You mean to tell me when people wanted new clothes, jewelry, a TV, or to eat out at a restaurant, they actually had to save up the cash to do so? What kind of barbaric system would make you live within your means? The Depression era adults had somehow survived for over two decades after WWII without buying cheap foreign crap they didn’t need with money they didn’t have using a piece of plastic with a Wall Street bank logo emblazoned on the front.

1968 marked a turning point for America. LBJ’s welfare/warfare state had begun the downward spiral of a once rational country. We chose guns and butter, with the bill being charged to the national credit card. It was fitting that Wall Street introduced the credit card in 1968.

Friday, November 08, 2013

True Unemployment Nears 14 Percent: Thank you, President Subprime Shovel-Ready Clunker Obamacare Dodd-Frank DREAM Act McDowngrade!

No matter how many times they're presented with proof of their failures, progressives are immune to facts, logic, reason and history:

The “real” unemployment rate rose from 13.6% in September to 13.8% in October, according to figures released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

...Known as the U-6 unemployment rate, this “real” unemployment figure, seasonally adjusted, includes the unemployed “plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons..." The U-6 rate captures the fuller picture of people who are willing and able to work, but cannot find a job.

Since President Barack Obama has been president, the U-6 unemployment rate rose from 14.25% in January 2009 to a high of 17.1% in October, November and December 2009 and the same rate in February, March, and April 2010. The U-6 rate did not fall below 14% under Obama until March 2013, when it hit 13.8%, the same rate for October 2013.

Even more shocking, the Labor Force Participation Rate dropped yet again, this time to 62.8 percent.


This is the lowest it's been since 1978, when another feckless Democrat named President Jimmy Carter was running things.

Let me recycle this graphic from 2011... because, sadly, it's still relevant:


Arithmetic always trumps ideology. Sadly, Barack Obama has proven himself incapable of learning this simple, immutable fact.

He's a dyed-in-the-wool, radical progressive -- a true believer. Collectivism is his religion and if it means destroying America to impart his wisdom, then so be it.


Hat tips: Weasel Zippers and Badblue News

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Isn't someone in charge of removing embarrassing lies from the White House website?

As iOwnTheWorld points out, the White House site still reads as follows:


Here's the closeup:


Oh, and I almost forgot.


They lied again. The White House admits the website won't be fixed by the end of November.

Oh, well. It only cost $1.1 billion to build a completely broken website.

And what's a few billion between Democrats?


TOP 10 LESSONS OF OBAMACARE

Robert Tranciski, writing at Real Clear Politics, offers his take on the top 10 lessons of Obamacare. It's worth reading in its entirety, but the Cliff Notes version is as follows:

1. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

You've heard all of the stories, which can be summarized by the real quote: "I was all for ObamaCare until I found out I was paying for it." Or other other real quote: "Of course, I want people to have health care. I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."

The entire middle-class welfare state, to which ObamaCare is the latest addition, is an attempt to make the middle class into a constituency for big government by promising them endless benefits, from free health care to a guaranteed income, with no costs, consequences, or trade-offs, and no strings attached. Everything is supposed to be paid for by "the rich," which means anyone who makes a dollar more than you.

Of course, it turns out that it's not "the rich" paying for everyone else. It's the productive being sucked dry by the leeches.

2. Regulation stifles production.

Speaking of productivity: when you pass 25,000 pages of regulations, you get people who are good at following regulations, not at producing goods or services of value. It turns out that all of the myriad regulations may not, in fact, be wholly compatible with reality. But reality is of no concern to the government.

3. The power to tax is the power to destroy.

Government's only power It is the power to tax, to confiscate, to ban, to jail, to kill -- but not to produce anything of value.

There are already indications that ObamaCare will lead to a shortage of doctors because it's paying them less to do more work... the essence of ObamaCare is summed up in the fact that millions of people are now being booted off of their existing health insurance plans--but the state and federal exchanges that are supposed to offer them new insurance aren't even functioning.

As for who destroyed our health care system?