The White House Fable Factory

Michelle Malkin / Townhall Columnist

Now that true horror stories of Obamacare's wrecking ball are finally reaching the public, the White House doesn't like "anecdotes." Live by tale-telling; die by tale-telling.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney huffed that stage-four gallbladder cancer survivor Edie Littlefield Sundby's personal account in The Wall Street Journal of seeing her health insurance plan canceled and her access to doctors cut off was "sensational." Not a shred of compassion for her predicament. No sorrow for her loss. Must. Attack. Messenger.

There are millions out there like Sundby who are using Facebook, Twitter, Twitchy.com and a new website called MyCancellation.com to share their plights. White House flacks and hacks are working overtime to "debunk" their experiences, bash insurance companies and deride individual market consumers losing their plans as stupid dupes whose stories don't add up.

Here's the thing. This Alinsky-steeped administration has relied on an endless stream of sensationalized, phony personal dramas to sell Obamacare. Last month, Organizing for Action (previously Obama for America) promoted the "success story" of Chad Henderson, a supposedly random young person who miraculously enrolled in Obamacare while everyone else in America experienced major tech meltdowns and sticker shock.

Turned out Lying Chad was actually an OFA volunteer who hadn't really enrolled in Obamacare yet because he was "joking." No matter. Yesterday, Obama appeared before OFA to solicit even more stories from the group to help propagandize Obamacare. A refresher course on the White House Fable Factory's greatest hits:

--Stanley Ann Dunham. Obama cited his mom's deathbed fight with her insurer several times over the years to support the Obamacare ban on pre-existing condition exclusions by insurers. During a 2008 debate, he shared her plight: "For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that." But New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that Dunham's health insurer had in fact reimbursed her medical expenses with nary an objection. The actual coverage dispute centered on a separate disability insurance policy.

--Otto Raddatz. In 2009, Obama publicized the plight of this Illinois cancer patient, who supposedly died after he was dropped from his Fortis/Assurant Health insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn't known about. The truth? He got the treatment he needed in 2005 and lived for nearly four more years.

--Robin Beaton. Also in 2009, Obama claimed Beaton, a breast cancer patient, lost her insurance after "she forgot to declare a case of acne." In fact, she failed to disclose a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately, but had her insurance restored anyway after intense public lobbying.

--John Brodniak. A 23-year-old unemployed Oregon sawmill worker, Brodniak's health woes were spotlighted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as a textbook argument for Obamacare. Brodniak reportedly was diagnosed with cavernous hemangioma, a neurological condition, and was allegedly turned away by emergency room doctors. Kristof called the case "monstrous" and decried opponents of the Democrats' health care proposals as heartless murderers. The truth? Brodniak not only had coverage through Oregon's Medicaid program, but was also a neurology patient at the prestigious Oregon Health and Science University in Portland (a safety-net institution that accepts all Medicaid patients). Kristof never retracted the legend.

--Marcelas Owens. An 11-year-old boy from Seattle, Owens took a coveted spot next to the president in March 2010 when Obamacare was signed into law. Marcelas' 27-year-old mother, Tiffany Owens, died of pulmonary hypertension. The family said the single mother of three lost her job as a fast-food manager and lost her insurance. She died in 2007 after receiving emergency care and treatment throughout her illness. Progressive groups (for whom Marcelas' relatives worked) dubbed Marcelas an "insurance abuse survivor." But there wasn't a shred of evidence that any insurer had "abused" the boy or his mom. Further, Washington State already offered a plethora of existing government assistance programs to laid-off and unemployed workers like Marcelas' mom. The family and its public relations agents never explained why she didn't enroll.

--Natoma Canfield. The White House made the Ohio cancer patient a poster child for Obamacare in 2010 after she wrote a letter complaining about skyrocketing premiums and the prospect of losing her home. After Obama gave Canfield a shout-out at a health care rally in Strongsville, Ohio, and promised to control costs, officials at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, which is treating her, made clear that they would "not put a lien on her home" and that she was eligible for a wide variety of state aid and private charity care.

Phony manufactured tales built Obamacare. Real stories of Obamacare wreckage will bring it down.

Op-ed: 

Obama's LIES can kill you
By: Diane Sori

“If you had or have one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law, and you really like that plan, what we said was, you could keep it…if it hasn’t changed since the law’s passed.” – Barack HUSSEIN Obama 11/4/13

NO…that is NOT what he said at least 29 times on camera and countless times in print over these past three years.

NOT even trying to rationalize his LIE, Barack HUSSEIN Obama is simply denying he ever spewed it. Trying to pull a ‘do-over’…to rewrite history if you will to suit his nefarious ObamaCare agenda…as try as he might Obama CANNOT deny these previous words now come back to haunt, “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away.”

“Period”…as in definitely…NO problem.  ”Period”…as in its written in stone…that is if you are NOT someone who talks out of both sides of their mouth…someone who knew three years ago that there was NO way people would be able to keep their current plans or the doctors they liked… someone who let his policy advisers be overruled by malicious and vindictive political players… political players the likes of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who veraciously pushed for ObamaCare but freely admitted they had NOT even read it.

Obama LIED…out-and-out LIED to the American people and he now has the gall to spew a new LIE to rationalize and justify how his first LIE is actually his version of a truth being kept…and the sheeple, the ‘sponges’ and those still enamored of him will fall for it as they will hear the new spin quite differently than the rest of us do, simply because it benefits them to do so and the rest of us…the vast majority of Americans…will again be the ones getting screwed by yet another Obama LIE.

And so it seems that both ObamaCare and its namesake are the gifts from hell that keep on giving for the undeniable reality is that to date almost 4 million insurance policies people were happy with got cancelled by carriers they liked, and are now forced into the anything but wonderful ObamaCare exchanges to get coverage they do NOT need…do NOT want…and have to pay more for. And it does NOT stop with those four million for you can feel the angst in the air as every walk to the mailbox becomes a crap shoot of who will be getting cancelled next.

And here’s another little Obama giftie soon to become reality… according to Chris Conover, economist and research scholar for the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at DUKE University and adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), once the employee mandate kicks in next year 129 million...YES you read that right…129 MILLION Americans… including 35 million directly losing actual employee coverage… translates into a whopping 68% of all Americans currently with private health insurance losing their coverage.

And Barack HUSSEIN Obama and his anything but a health care bill built this sad scenario and completely owns it.

Adding insult to this grievous injury is that when someone is cancelled they have to hear Obama bloviating that their policies were cancelled because he…the media anointed ‘savior’ of us all’…deemed their policies and their coverage ‘inferior’ as they did NOT cover enough of what he…Barack HUSSEIN Obama…says needs to be covered. What that really translates into is that those policies did NOT cover things the policy holder did NOT need or want, therefore could NOT be charged for…which means there will be less of ‘We the People’s’ hard earned dollars in the system to pay for Obama’s party loyal ‘you owe me’ supporters…the ‘sponges’ of our society…those who now get free health care by just walking into any emergency room in this country.

And if being cancelled itself wasn’t enough of a sucker-punch, so many ‘surprises’ still await those who now must go into the dreaded exchanges…surprises that can be dead right dangerous to one’s health…surprises like under ObamaCare you may NOT have access to the nation’s top tier (18) hospitals…the very hospitals on the cutting edge of the newest medical and surgical treatments… hospitals with America’s leading cancer specialists on staff… hospitals that could save your life if faced with this or any other catastrophic disease.

Remember, in pre-ObamaCare America the top-tier hospitals accepted insurance from dozens of private carriers, but it now seems that these hospitals…as leery of ObamaCare as ‘We the People’ are…will only accept but a few out of the 36 federal exchanges ObamaCare offers…and these same hospitals will only offer limited treatment and surgical options from those they do accept. So being denied treatment at these hospitals…unless you sign onto one of the few extremely expensive and high deductible Obama-approved exchanges…means basically that you have been subjected to the decision of a ‘death panel’ but you’ll NEVER see those words in print.

And many other non-top tier hospitals are saying ‘NO’ to ObamaCare as well, because the ObamaCare caps on premiums means that insurers will offer said doctors and hospitals far less reimbursement wise for services rendered than they were offered before ObamaCare reared its ugly head.

In fact, provisions in ObamaCare actually cut reimbursement rates for patients on Medicare… the very people most likely to be hospitalized…those older Americans Obama has NO use for…as in pay hospitals little for their treatment so that it becomes cost prohibited to treat them…can anyone again say death panels.

And to make the hospital situation even worse is that many people perusing the exchanges are doing so with much needed information being deliberately omitted…as in the listing of exactly what doctors and what hospitals are in the exchange they might choose. This means that some people might inadvertently purchase policies that actually have NO hospital coverage at all…forcing those who need hospitalization to be hit with a huge bill for having to go out-of-network for treatment when chances are the policy they had before being cancelled would have allowed them to to go to the hospital of their choice…including to the top-tier hospitals.

In NO uncertain terms ObamaCare is a nightmare for America’s hospitals for NO hospital wants to turn away the sick…to have chose who they will service and who they will NOT or CANNOT service because some narcissistic, anti-American bloviator of a president has decided to make and initiate for us all what are really medical decisions that he has NO right making.

And the sad reality is that with ObamaCare in place it will only get worse for America’s hospitals and for “We the People’ before it gets better…that is if it ever does.

Obamacare Is Obama Unmasked

David Limbaugh / Townhall Columnist

Everyone is focusing on Obamacare because it is such an obvious disaster, but in fact, it is but a microcosm of Barack Obama's entire presidency. Obamacare is Obama unmasked. 

 Aren't some of you tired of making lame excuses for him that only serve to make things worse? He has made a mess of nearly everything his policies have touched, and he's mostly avoided the blame; but he owns Obamacare, and he has nowhere to hide.

When someone with the influence Obama enjoyed upon first taking office sets out to fundamentally transform the nation -- and he has the unqualified support of the entire liberal media apparatus, the Democratic Party in lock step, millions of people purchased with government money and/or indoctrinated in liberal universities, and the cudgels of racial shaming and white guilt -- the possibilities are endless.

Constitutionalists have observed for years that America has been on a downward spiral as its ruling class has discarded its founding principles -- the very ideas that led to this nation's uniqueness, power, prosperity and benevolence. We've known that we could not forever piggyback, with impunity, on America's system of limited government and its free market economy. Eventually, statist encroachments on both would destroy our prosperity, liberty and power.

But we were thinking in terms of decades into the future, not a matter of a few years. Who would have ever thought the United States would embark on such an accelerated path of national suicide?

At the beginning, people could argue that Obama would usher in a period of prosperity and bipartisanship and that things would get better in America. But after five years of unconscionably reckless federal spending, a wholesale assault on our domestic energy industries, endless abuses of executive authority and other lawless incursions on the Constitution, unprecedented divisiveness and polarization across economic, racial and gender lines, America's declining power and prestige in the world, an explosion of the welfare state, and the worst economic recovery in 60 years, how can anyone who cares about this nation's future and the well-being of our children and grandchildren keep supporting this man's policies?

Even those of you who seem to have an endless capacity for buying into the administration's childish scapegoating of the Bush administration or the current GOP opposition for every Obama policy failure surely are beginning to have doubts as you watch the inglorious unfolding of Obamacare.

At first, you may have been hanging on to the fantasy that this was just a technical problem with the website -- perhaps marginally understandable given the immense scope of the "transition" into government-run health care. But unless you have been asleep the past few weeks, you understand that the problems with the website were so colossal that only an incompetent and arrogant administration could have presided over them.

But you also know that as horrendous as the website problems are, they pale in comparison with the substantive problems with Obamacare and Obama's abject lies to pass the bill in the first place and his continuing pattern of deceit concerning this boondoggle.

You may choose, like New York Times editors, to become part of the lie and euphemize Obama's Obamacare lies as "misstatements." But that's an insult to anyone in possession of the left side of his brain. Actually, it's an insult to right-siders, too, because you'd have to be bereft of intuitive powers not to sense the enormity of the presidential deception.

It is inconceivable that Obama merely misspoke when he promised that Americans could keep their private plans and doctors if they liked them and when he said the premiums for an average family of four would decrease by $2,500. Those were cold, calculated lies designed to defraud the American people and their representatives into supporting Obama's "signature" legislative dream, which was never about increasing access, reducing costs, increasing quality and preserving choices. Rather, Obamacare has always been nothing less than the linchpin in Obama's bigger dream to fundamentally change America into a nation he could like instead of resent -- a socialist utopia rather than the land of the free, of the brave and of equal opportunity.

Those on the left who stubbornly insist on continuing to support Obama and his destruction of America need to re-evaluate him. Is your appetite for denial unbounded?

Those on the right who insist on continuing to pull their punches instead of calling it like it is will also eventually have America's blood on their hands.

We all had better wake up. There's only so much bitterness and covetousness a nation's leaders can arouse in its people before they reduce it to permanent mediocrity.

'Affordable' Care Depends on the Size of Your Subsidy  
Byron York / Townhall Columnist

What does the word "affordable" in the Affordable Care Act mean? Many people might assume it means Obamacare will make health coverage less expensive. That's certainly the impression President Obama gave when he promised his national health care scheme would "cut the average family's premium by about $2,500 per year.

But Obama and the Democrats who passed the law didn't really mean that premiums will go down. What they meant was that premiums might well go up, but the government will give some Americans money with which they can pay the higher premiums and still come out ahead.

For some people that will be true. For others, not so much. Unlike Social Security and Medicare, Obamacare is a means-tested entitlement program. It will give low-income Americans substantial taxpayer-paid subsidies with which to purchase insurance. People who make a bit more will receive smaller subsidies, and those above a certain income level will receive no subsidies at all. If they have to purchase higher-priced coverage, that's their problem.

The pro-reform Kaiser Family Foundation has created on its website a subsidy calculator into which anyone can enter his location, income and family size to come up with an estimate of how big, or small, his Obamacare subsidy will be.

Start, for example, with a low-income family of four living near St. Louis, Mo., with $35,325 in household income (that is 150 percent of the federal poverty rate for a family that size). A Silver Plan policy for the family would have an annual premium of $8,088, according to Kaiser. But the family would receive a taxpayer-paid subsidy of $6,675, which means the family would pay, with its own money, just $1,413 for the coverage. (Kaiser chose the Silver Plan for the calculator because that is the plan that determines the size of Obamacare.

Of course, most families of four in Missouri make more than $35,325 a year. The 2012 Census Bureau estimated that the median income for a Missouri family of four was $72,230 -- meaning that half the state's families of four are below that level and half are above.

For a family that is right on the median income, $72,230, the annual premium would still be $8,088, but the taxpayer-paid subsidy would fall to $1,226, meaning the family would pay, with its own money, $6,862 for the coverage. Is that a better deal than they have now? Maybe yes, and maybe no. In any event, they won't save as much as the president promised.

Finally, choose a higher income level, but one at which there are still a lot of people. For a family of four with an income of $85,000, the premium remains $8,088 but the subsidy shrinks to just $13 a year, meaning the family will pay, with its own money, $8,075 for coverage. So that family will technically receive help with its health care costs -- but not really.

For families above that level, and there are a lot of them, the subsidy will be $0. The bottom line is, when -- or if -- large numbers of people actually begin purchasing coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, many will find the much-touted subsidies aren't for them.

And that will be the key question of Obamacare: Will it help more people than it hurts, or will it hurt more people than it helps? If the answer is the former, Obamacare might become a permanent feature of American life. If the answer is the latter, it will be politically unsustainable and will fail.

The administration and its defenders might argue that the numbers will be a bit different, that some premiums could be lower or subsidies higher. But the basics are the same: Obamacare is all about subsidies, and "affordable" means the government is paying for all or part of it.

That is why the administration and its defenders are urging Democrats nervous about the disastrous Obamacare rollout to just wait for the subsidies to arrive. When that happens, they say, the Obamacare controversy will subside.

Whatever the case, the cost to taxpayers will be enormous. Obamacare limits the percentage of income that subsidy-receiving Americans have to spend on health coverage. Those at the top of the subsidy ladder are obligated to spend no more than 9.5 percent of their income on premiums. Those lower down pay a lower percentage -- for that family of four with $35,325 in annual income, it would be 4 percent.

So the "affordable" in Affordable Care Act doesn't really mean affordable at all.

What Obama really meant to say...

Iran's Supremo Ali Khamenei calls Israel an "illegitimate and bastard regime"

From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

More moderation from the New, Moderate Iran. Note how in this story Khamenei is a moderate, whereas in this one he is a hardliner. "Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei Calls Israel ‘Bastard Regime,’" from the Washington Free Beacon, November 4:

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel an ‘illegitimate and bastard regime’ while criticizing Israel’s alliance with the United States on Sunday, Israel Hayom reports.

Khamenei’s comments seem to undo the work done by Iran’s recently elected “moderate” President Hasan Rouhani, who has been on a charm offensive of late. Rouhani’s semingly moderate approach has led to a renewed round of nuclear negotiations with the P5+1 — U.N. Security Council permanent members Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S., plus Germany.

Additionally, Khamenei spoke of nuclear negotiations between Iran and world powers.

Khamenei voiced his support on Sunday for Iran’s talks with world powers over its disputed nuclear program, while expressing pessimism about them.

“No one should see our negotiating team as compromisers,” Khamenei, Iran’s top decision-maker on its nuclear drive, was quoted as saying on his official website. “I am not optimistic about the [nuclear] negotiations but, with the grace of God, we will not suffer losses either,” he added.

Newsmx
Rubio, "Crist cannot be trusted"

 By Cathy Burke

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Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on Monday blasted his old rival, former Gov. Charlie Crist, calling him "a consummate political opportunist that can't be trusted."

The slap from Rubio — who humiliated Crist in the 2010 GOP Senate primary — came after the ex-governor announced he'd be running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Gov. Rick Scott next year, Sunshine State News reported.

Crist joined the Democrats at the end of last year.

"Floridians have a clear choice between a governor with a proven record of job creation, and a consummate political opportunist that can't be trusted,” Rubio said.

“Charlie Crist's governorship was underwhelming, to say the least. Rick Scott has proven himself very capable of cleaning up after Charlie's mess, creating jobs, and restoring Floridians' hope about the future."

Some of Florida’s most prominent Democrats stood with Crist for his formal campaign announcement when he suggested his flexibility is a plus for voters sick of partisan warfare in Washington and Tallahassee, The Washington Post reported.

“The far-right wing seems to want to make much of my party affiliation,” he told cheering supporters and family members, including his Republican parents. “That is precisely what’s wrong with politics today.”