Affordable Care Act, Not Insurers, At Fault For Cancelled Insurance Plans

Matthew Needham / Townhall Columnist

 

President Obama has come under fire recently for promises about the Affordable Care Act. The President repeatedly assured doubters that under the Affordable Care Act, Americans would be able to keep their existing health insurance. As a growing number of Americans receive cancellation notices from their insurance companies, many are describing this promise as misleading, if not an outright lie. These cancellation notices are particularly infuriating to young people, who are now forced to subsidize the health care of older, more affluent Americans.

In a speech defending the law on Wednesday, the President attempted to shift the blame for these cancellations on “bad apple insurers.” This claim ignores the fact that these cancellation notices are the result of insurance companies simply complying with the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration is depending on “young invincibles” to enroll in health insurance plans to make the law a success, but young people would be wise to consider the misleading nature of the administration’s claims.

During Congress’ debate of the Affordable Care Act and the resulting political aftermath, one of President Obama’s most persistent claims was that people who were happy with their health insurance would be able to keep it. In an address to the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, the President stated, “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period.” The President planted this straightforward stake in the ground, with no caveats.

As the law has gradually taken effect, this has proven untrue. According to CBS News, more than 2 million Americans are losing their health insurance plans because of the Affordable Care Act.

While the Obama administration has admitted these insurance cancellations are taking place, the administration has attempted to shift the blame away from the Affordable Care Act. In a press conference on Tuesday, Press Secretary Jay Carney stated to those receiving health insurance cancellation notices, “Your insurer basically threw you off that plan.” On Wednesday, the President himself attributed these changes to “bad apple insurers” who are attempting to “downgrade or cancel these substandard plans.”

In reality, these insurance cancellations are the result of insurance companies simply complying with the regulations put in place by the Affordable Care Act. According to Peter Suderman, Senior Editor of Reason Magazine, the Affordable Care Act “institute[s] a slew of new requirements that [are] certain to result in health insurers dropping current plans for millions of people.” Many existing plans in the individual market, which were targeted to meet consumer demand, did not fit these mandates.

Health insurance companies have had to cancel many of their existing plans to create new, more costly plans which do comply with these new mandates.

While this may be news to those who followed President Obama’s rhetoric over the past few years, the large number of health insurance cancellations were actually expected by the Obama administration. NBC News recently took a look at regulations issued in July 2010, finding that the Obama Administration “knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.”

The success of the Affordable Care Act rests upon a large number of so-called “young invincibles” enrolling in health care. In order to make the law work, “The White House has said it needs 2.7 million young adults to buy insurance through the government-run marketplaces,” according to Businessweek. But as Cathy Reisenwitz recently noted on Forbes, the law “hoses young, relatively poor people like [her] right when we least need high bills for services they’re not using.” In the face of mounting evidence that President Obama’s claims about the Affordable Care Act were misleading, young people are wise to remain skeptical of the law’s supposed benefits.

Maybe Pain Will Teach You Millenials Not To Vote For Your Own Serfdom

Kurt Schlichter/ Townhall Columnist

 

You Millenials voted for Obama by a margin of 28 percent, which will make it a lot easier for me to accept the benefits you will be paying for. We warned you that liberalism was a scam designed to take the fruits of your labor and transfer it to us, the older, established generation. Oh, and also to the couch-dwelling, Democrat-voting losers who live off of food stamps and order junk from QVC with their Obamaphones.

You didn’t listen to us. Maybe you’ll listen to pain.

I have been told that being hard on you Millennials will turn you against conservatism, that I should offer you a positive, hopeful message that avoids the touchy problem of your manifest stupidity.

No. There’s no sugar-coating it – your votes for Democrats have ensured that you are the first generation in American history that will fail to exceed what their parents attained. Embracing liberalism was a stupid thing to do, done for the stupidest of reasons, and I will now let you subsidize my affluent lifestyle without a shred of guilt.

I’m a 48 year old trial lawyer living on the coast in California – I should have “Hope and Change” tattooed on my glutes. I’d have an excuse to be lib-curious, but you Millennials? Why do you support an ideology that pillages you to pay-off Democrat constituencies? Your time in the indoctrination factories of academia trained you in a form of “critical thinking” that is neither. Somehow, you came to embrace the bizarre notion that conservatives are psychotic Jesus freaks who want to Footloosisze America into a land of mandatory Sunday school and no dancing.

But liberals, in contrast, are nice. Obama is cool. You chose petty fascism with a smile. Not a lot of thought went into it. Facts, evidence – these were mere distractions from the feelings-based validation that came from rejecting us wicked conservatives.

What did you get? The chance to be forced to buy health insurance you don’t want at inflated rates so my rates can be lower. You get to pay more out of your monthly barista take – liberalism ensured that the tanked job market foreclosed a real career – so that I get to pay less out of my lawyer checks.

Thanks, suckers.

You fume that conservatives want to spy on you in your bedrooms. Leaving aside the fact that that your tacky boudoir fumblings are the last thing conservatives care about, have you noticed how your precious Big Brother spies on your doings everywhere else? But who cares about that – Mumford & Sons totally digs Obama!

Don’t even get me started on your crappy music.

Enjoy your student loans, Millennials! We tried to tell you that it was a Democrat scam designed to subsidize liberal academia by allowing you to go into decades of crushing debt to pay for a bachelors in Ancient Guatemalan Gender Identity Issues.

Good plan. Now fetch my latte – I’m in a hurry to get to my corner office. And I’ll leave you a tip – next time you decide to vote for a liberal, first be born in 1964.

Don’t think that I’m happy about this. I came to Los Angeles after the Gulf War. I had a car and a few bucks I had saved in the desert which went right into paying for Loyola Law School. I had no contacts and no money, but I knew I had endless opportunity.

I worked hard. I could start a business. I could get credit. I could – and did – build my own future.
But can you? Liberalism, with its impoverishing redistribution, crippling regulations and the debt it suckered you into undertaking, has ensured that most of you can’t.

You live with your parents, and Obamacare encourages sponging until you are 26 years old. At 26, I was leading Americans in a war, not begging mommy to pay my bills. The liberals want you to be eternal man-children, wearing cargo shorts and passively pumping money into their socialized medicine nightmare in return for “Brosurance” you don’t want or need.

It breaks my heart to see the young lawyers I hire hobbled by six figures of debt. But hey, your desperation works fine for us established folks. I got 297 applications for a junior associate position.

Let me say that again – 297. Most of them weren’t even practicing law – they were brewing coffee, not writing briefs. Now, I understand that most of you learned nothing but liberal clichés in college, but take a guess: As an employer, are the salaries I pay generally more or less when I have 297 people competing for each job?

So feel free to keep voting for the liberals who keep you in chains. I’ll take my cheaper insurance, my future Social Security checks, and the other benefits that come from being established without guilt.

The guys who you squander your votes upon certainly won’t change that equation. You’ll tread water in life, but hey, at least those conservatives won’t be in charge!

Thanks again, suckers. Now get off my lawn.

Prepare For A Grid-Down Scenario

by Bob Livingston / Personal Liberty Digest

PHOTOS.COM

On Nov. 13-14, America’s major electricity generating companies along with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and government agencies in Canada and Mexico will conduct a drill to test system responses to cyberattacks and physical attacks on the North American electrical grid that cause its widespread failure.

The drill is called GridEx II, and it moves the threat of a total electrical blackout that sends the country back into the 19^th century from the stuff of science fiction and/or tinfoil hattery to the mainstream.

According to The New York Times, the drill is designed to:

practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.

“This is different from a hurricane that hits X, Y and Z counties in the Southeast and they have a loss of power for three or four days,” said the official in charge of the drill, Brian M. Harrell of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC.

“We really want to go beyond that.”

One goal of the drill… is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities.

Should the grid collapse, those with medical conditions requiring machines to keep them alive or stable could be in trouble quickly, but most people could easily survive without power for two or three days. It’s not unusual for major storms to knock out power for that long. But longer-term power outages turn into desperate situations as water and food run low and/or generators run out of fuel. Google Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy to see how some people fared during long-term localized outages.

A nationwide outage would quickly become catastrophic. Communications would be down; water and sewer wouldn’t function; the supply chain would stop, causing grocery shelves to be rendered bare within hours; and the banking system would crash. Government services, often overwhelmed with localized outages, would be completely inadequate.

Within days, the weak and infirm would be dead from dehydration. Those living hand-to-mouth or subsisting on government handouts would become desperate, and rioting and looting would become rampant. Look to recent food stamp riots and headlines following Black Friday shopping madness incidents for a look at how quickly people turn into animals when they feel they are being deprived or unfairly treated over even the most trivial of things.

If the grid stays down for weeks or longer, civilization as we understand it will break down completely as more people become thirsty, hungry and increasingly desperate.

Government functionaries and electric company talking heads have said for many years that the electrical grid is vulnerable to terrorist attack. One of the GridEx II scenarios has a person breaking into a substation as if to steal copper but instead uploading a virus that shuts down the system. But the grid is also in danger from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon attack or even solar flares.

Experts say a Carrington-class major solar flare event would fry the entire electrical grid. A Carrington-class ejection is a reference to the 1859 EMP that melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America.

I have been writing about the need for preparedness for years. My advice continues to be that everyone have at a bare minimum three days of food and water on hand. But even better, everyone should have a three months’ supply. For instructions on how to accomplish that, go here or buy my book, How to Survive the Collapse of Civilization.

In addition to food and water, guns and ammunition, alternative sources for heating and cooking, personal hygiene items, food for pets, junk silver (pre-1965 U.S. dimes, quarters, half dollars and dollars) and gold are necessities.

The GridEx II drill has many in the prepper world atwitter. They see the drill as a dangerous opportunity/excuse for the grid to crash and martial law to be established. The angst is fueled by the fact that major events (9/11, Sandy Hook, Boston Marathon bombing, etc.) have historically coincided with government agencies conducting drills simulating the actual events. Combine that with the National Geographic Channel’s recent airing of “American Blackout” and it makes for a perfect storm of propaganda meets excuse.

Romney Slams Obama's 'Fundamental Dishonesty

Newsmax Wires

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Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who lost the 2012 presidential race to President Barack Obama, accused the president Sunday of "fundamental dishonesty" when he repeatedly promised Americans they would be able to keep their existing insurance plans under Obamacare. 

“He wasn’t telling the truth,” Romney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“That fundamental dishonesty has really -- has really put in peril the whole foundation of his second term,” Romney said. “I think it is rotting it away.”

What “has really undermined the president's credibility in the hearts of the American people is that he went out, as a centerpiece of his campaign and as a centerpiece of Obamacare over the last several years, saying time and time again that fundamental to his plan was the right people would have to keep their insurance plan, and he knew that was not the case....”

Romney added: "Had the president been truthful and told the American people that millions would lose their insurance and millions more would see their premiums skyrocket… there would have been such a hue and cry against it, (that) it would not have passed.”

During the presidential campaign and later, as Congress debated the Affordable Health Care Act, Obama repeatedly said that no one would be forced to give up their existing health coverage under the law.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney signed into law a 2006 state program used as a model for the federal law, known as Obamacare. Massachusetts, Romney said, “teaches some important lessons some states are not going to want to follow.”

Health insurance is more expensive in Massachusetts than in any other state, Romney pointed out, adding that “Texas and Minnesota and Montana” are not necessarily going to want to adopt such a costly plan.

"First of all, the Massachusetts experience was a state-run plan," Romney explained. "The right way to deal with health care reform is not to have a one-size-fits-all plan that's imposed on all the states, but recognizing the differences between different states' populations, states should be able to craft their own plans to get all their citizens insured, and to make sure that preexisting conditions are covered.

"And there's some other differences," Romney said. "In Massachusetts, we phased in the requirements so that there was a slow rollout. That way you could test the systems as you went along to make sure there wouldn't be glitches.

"I think you're going to find, when it's all said and done, after all these states that are laboratories of democracy get their chance to try their own plans, that those who follow the path that we pursued will find it's the best path, and we'll end up with a nation that's taken a mandate approach."

Romney said Obama must work with Republicans if he's going to fix the mess that the Obamacare rollout has become.

"I think the only way he can rebuild credibility is to work with Republicans and Democrats and try and rebuild a foundation," Romney said. "We've got to have a president. We've got to have a president that can lead. And right now, he's not able to do so."

The White House quickly went on the defensive.

The Massachusetts plan did take time to get off the ground, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said, enrolling only 0.03 percent of the population in the first month.

“I can promise you that the first enrollment numbers, which were released later this month, are not going to be what we want them to be. There’s no question about that,” Pfeiffer said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “The website hasn’t worked the way we want it to work. But we take responsibility for that, take responsibility for the errors, take responsibility for fixing it.” 

Between 5 million and 7 million people will need to enter private health care exchanges for the system to work, said Ezekiel Emanuel, vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania and an architect of the Obama plan. Enrollment will accelerate as the March deadline approaches, just as it did in Massachusetts, he said.

“You would expect at this stage of the game, from everything we know about the exchanges, that not a lot of people would sign up,” Emanuel said on “Fox News Sunday.” “People will put off buying until the end.”

After appearances on the Hill last week, administration officials are set to testify again this week about what went wrong with the online health portal. The government’s health care website tells visitors that online applications aren’t available from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. ET daily “while we make improvements.”

Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has overseen the building and startup of federal online health exchanges, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Nov. 5.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is set to appear the next day before the Senate Finance Committee.

The flawed debut of the health website, with delays, outages and software errors, is tarnishing Obama’s signature legislative achievement and has complicated his second-term agenda as his approval ratings drop.

Forty-eight percent of Americans said the government is doing a “poor” job of implementing the health law, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found. The law itself is supported by about 47 percent of respondents who said it should be kept or expanded, compared with 37 percent who said they want it repealed.

“I think government is inherently inept, because they don’t work on a profit motive,” Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said on the “This Week” program. “I would say that there are fundamental things government can do. But government shouldn’t take on new opportunities or new things to do when it’s not managing what it has now.”

Romney also tipped his hat to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential Republican candidate for president in 2016.

“Chris could easily become our nominee and save our party and help get this nation on the right track again,” Romney said. “They don’t come better than Chris Christie.”

Christie, who is favored to win re-election on Nov. 5, is “one of the very strongest lights of the Republican Party,” Romney said. Christie, Senator Marc Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Romney’s former running mate, all are electable, he said.

Best description of ObamaCare......

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said,
“We have to pass it, to find out what’s in it!”

A physician called into a radio show and said,
"that's the definition of a stool sample."

That pretty well sums it up.

Op-ed:  
Five states hold the key to ObamaCare's success or failure...and more
By: Diane Sori

“I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage – they like their plan and they value their relationship with their doctor. And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period.”                                       Barack HUSSEIN Obama

LIAR...NOT only did Barack HUSSEIN Obama LIE to ‘We the People’ about being able to keep our current insurance policies and doctors we like, but he also LIED about ObamaCare’s true intentions and why only ‘certain states’ will actually see their rates lowered.

The fact is that insurance on the ObamaCare health exchanges will cost more than existing insurance except in five states projected to see lowered rates (see chart)…five ‘blue’ states…New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Colorado, and Rhode Island…and these five states are key to ObamaCare succeeding.

We all know young adults in the 25 to 34-year age bracket…'healthy' young adults…are needed for ObamaCare to be successfully operational, because it will be these young people who will pick-up the costs for older Americans, those more likely to become ill. Simply, without them signing on ObamaCare will fail. And those five states…five states with some of the highest numbers in that critical 25 to 34 age group (1)…are the states where the lower monthly premiums will hopefully make ObamaCare attractive to them.

New York has 2,659,000 young adults between the ages of 25 and 34…New Jersey has 1,100,000…Ohio has 1,410,000 in that age group…Colorado has 726,000, and Rhode Island has 127,000 in that critical age group. And with seven million enrollees needed by March 1, 2014, if all those 25 to 34 year olds in those five states alone were to sign-up, that would give ObamaCare 6,022,000 enrollees…and even if just half in these five states signed-up, ObamaCare would be almost half way to success.

Five states chosen for lower policy rates…five states chosen perhaps because they all have a higher number of women than men…chosen so Obama could use his self-fabricated ‘supposed’ Republican ‘War on Women’ to his advantage by playing on women’s sympathies and emotions with issues like motherhood and abortion…

And with the issue of single-parent households…households for the most part headed by women…the very households that most likely cannot currently afford private insurance. New York, New Jersey, and Colorado have 30% of all its children in single-family households, Ohio has 37%, and Rhode Island has 40% of all its children in a single-family household. And while other states (Mississippi for example) might have more single-family households percentage wise, these states (except for Rhode Island of course) have higher population numbers that translate into higher sign-up numbers…numbers that also translate into the all important Democratic voter turnout numbers.

Did Obama have premium numbers manipulated downward in these five states with mostly women heading single-parent households to play on their emotions and in debt them to ObamaCare for now insuring their children…for giving their children well-visits and immunizations for free…would their thank-you be unwavering partisan support…just something to consider.

Also, ObamaCare covers both Planned Parenthood and abortion. ObamaCare requires premium payers to be assessed an abortion surcharge every month to pay for abortions, and stipulates…in very small easily overlooked print…that the surcharge be minimally disclosed only at the time of enrollment…meaning many signing onto ObamaCare in good faith…especially vehemently anti-abortion Catholics and Christians…might NOT realize they’re paying for the very abortions they are morally opposed to until it is too late to do anything about it.

And guess which state has the most abortions in the Unites States…that honor…or should I say dishonor…goes to New York (with an astounding 119,996 legal abortions in 2010 and with 41% [88,000] of all New York City pregnancies ending in abortion in 2011(2)…followed by New Jersey. Ohio and Colorado are also in the top 15 states for abortions as well. And these again are four of the five states with projected lower premium costs…making ObamaCare attractive to today’s more’ ‘liberal-minded, anything goes’ young woman.

Reeling in women in the five states with lower premiums…hmmmm…

And we all know that blacks (I refuse to use the term African-American because I do NOT believe in any hyphenated Americans) are Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s core group of supporters for ObamaCare. That is just a fact…NOTHING racist about it or intended. And guess which state has the highest number of blacks in the United States…none other than New York. New York…one of the five states with projected lower insurance costs because of ObamaCare…and let’s be honest here…New York has the largest number of the very people Obama crafted ObamaCare for. And with blacks in New York comprising 15.8% (3,073,800) of New York’s total population as per the 2010 Census…blacks will sign onto ObamaCare (or more likely Medicaid) in high numbers with the lower premiums as a major draw and with ObamaCare provided subsidies if they cannot afford the payments.  And with them comes their loyalty to America’s ‘supposed’ first black president and his Democratic Party.

Also, while speaking of minorities let’s remember that Obama catered and pandered to the growing in numbers gay population during the 2012 election cycle. He gave them our military to be openly gay in…he gave them our public educational system by allowing the teaching of their ‘alternative lifestyle’…he gave them the right to marry as in the abomination known as ‘Gay Marriage’…and now he’s given them an incentive to sign onto ObamaCare with the dangling carrot of lower premiums in five states…five states having some of the highest number of gays living in them (3)…led off by New York with 3.8% of its total population of 19,378,102 (roughly 736,000) identifying as being gay...Ohio with 3.6% (roughly 415,000) out of 11,536,504 identifying as being gay…New Jersey with 3.7% (roughly 325,000) out of 8,791,894 identifying as being gay…Colorado having 3.2% (roughly 161,000) out of 5,029,196 identifying as gay…and with Rhode Island with 4.5% out of 1,052,567 (roughly 47,000) identifying as gay. 

And when you add those numbers together you have roughly 1,684,000 people identifying as being gay in those five states alone…the five states projected to have lower premium rates than before ObamaCare.  In other words about 1/7 of the number needed by March 1, 2014 to assure ObamaCare’s viability can be garnered by the gay population within just five states. And you wonder why Obama so pandered to the gay minority during the 2012 election cycle...concentrating his propaganda in those five states knowing that their premium cost numbers could be manipulated downward when he needed the gay vote as his payback for catering and pandering to them.

Bottom line…policy cost numbers were indeed manipulated as needed because ObamaCare was NEVER about quality health care for all Americans, but has always been about garnering and amassing numbers loyal to the Democratic Party. Manipulating numbers to assure the most important outcome of all…the presidential election in 2016 and for presidential elections in years beyond... securing outcomes BEFORE the first vote is even cast. And voter fraud is NOT needed to do so as five blue states…the ONLY five states projected to see insurance premiums actually drop under ObamaCare...have enough electoral college votes to tip the 2016 presidential race into the Democratic win column in a close election.

With blue states New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Colorado, and Rhode Island being the only states projected to see a drop in insurance premiums because of ObamaCare…New York with its 29 electoral votes…New Jersey with its 14…Ohio with its 18…Colorado has 9 electoral votes…and adding in Rhode Island with its 6 votes...means all together these numbers equal a total of 76 electoral votes out of the needed 270 plus one votes needed to secure the 2016 presidency.  And again, ONLY these states are projected to see premium rate drops because of ObamaCare.

So now you know the true objective of ObamaCare...the securing of the presidency for the Democrats in 2016 to continue Obama's so wanted 'fundamental change' of America...and doing it with what amounts to simple bribery. Barack HUSSEIN Obama and his cohorts need just five states to pull off the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the American people and are succeeding by merely manipulating numbers. And yes, other states do indeed have higher populations and percentage numbers of certain groups…states like California for example…but either they have NOT signed onto ObamaCare or their states will see HIGHER NOT LOWER policy premium rates because their populace appears NOT as gullible or enamored with Obama as that of those residing in those five states.

Simply put…the other states, besides these five, who have signed onto ObamaCare are actually being scammed for they are the ones who will foot the bill for the population in those five lower premium cost states…five states who’ve been ‘bribed’ by numbers manipulation to assure ObamaCare gets the sign-up numbers needed to help screw ‘We the People’ for generations to come.

And such is America's health care system under Barack HUSSEIN Obama...sad isn't it.

^{______________________________________________________________________}

⁽¹⁾  as per the 2010 Census...the latest figures currently available

⁽²⁾  latest figures available                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 ⁽³⁾ based on 2010 Census and  a corresponding Gallup survey