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Obamacare Outreach Hits the Clubs

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Photo Credit: Natalie Villacorta/POLITICO

Photo Credit: Natalie Villacorta/POLITICO

Washington’s new health insurance exchange dispatched a sign-up envoy to one of the city’s gay clubs one recent night to get out the word about Obamacare. It envisioned men mingling on the dance floor, a cocktail in one hand and enrollment information in the other.

But the brochures about DC Health Link, as the exchange is called, weren’t snapped up as quickly as the free condoms provided by a local clinic.

Like other health exchanges and coverage advocacy groups across the country, DC Health Link is reaching out to people wherever they may be, including bars. President Barack Obama even urged bartenders — who may themselves be uninsured — to hold happy hours to talk about health insurance and what it can offer young adults.

That strategy has clear challenges, however. In a packed nightclub like Town Danceboutique in Northwest D.C., music smothers conversation, dimmed lights make reading difficult, and health coverage is not what’s on people’s minds.

“They’re looking to let loose. They’re not looking to talk about serious topics,” patron Maven Saleh said as he surveyed the Town crowd on a winter weekend.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fire Departments Voice Concern Over Role of Volunteers Under ObamaCare

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Photo Credit: BARLETTA.HOUSE.GOV

Photo Credit: BARLETTA.HOUSE.GOV

Fire departments and other emergency squads say they are still waiting to learn from the IRS whether they will have to pay for volunteers’ medical insurance under ObamaCare and that having to cover such costs would really hurt many small-budget operations.

President Obama’s signature health-care law requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance for them. However, whether the IRS considers volunteers full-time employees remains unclear, in part because some receive a stipend or other financial incentives.

“At this point, it’s pretty much wait and see,” Michael Berg, president of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad in Virginia, told The Daily Progress. “We’re an all-volunteer organization. …. There’s a lot of speculation.”

Volunteer groups around the country — which operate in more rural areas and rely largely on fundraisers and donations to buy fire trucks and other rescue equipment — have gotten some bipartisan help from Capitol Hill.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Pennsylvania Rep. Lou Barletta, a Republican, have sponsored legislation to exempt volunteer fire, medical and rescue personnel from full-time status.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Repeals ObamaCare (+video)

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

By The Wall Street Journal.

It seems Nancy Pelosi was wrong when she said “we have to pass” ObamaCare to “find out what’s in it.” No one may ever know because the White House keeps treating the Affordable Care Act’s text as a mere suggestion subject to day-to-day revision. Its latest political retrofit is the most brazen: President Obama is partly suspending the individual mandate.

The White House argued at the Supreme Court that the insurance-purchase mandate was not only constitutional but essential to the law’s success, while refusing Republican demands to delay or repeal it. But late on Thursday, with only four days to go before the December enrollment deadline, the Health and Human Services Department decreed that millions of Americans are suddenly exempt.

Individuals whose health plans were canceled will now automatically qualify for a “hardship exemption” from the mandate. If they can’t or don’t sign up for a new plan, they don’t have to pay the tax. They can also get a special category of ObamaCare insurance designed for people under age 30.

So merry Christmas. If ObamaCare’s benefit and income redistribution requirements made your old, cheaper, better health plan illegal, you now have the option of going without coverage without the government taking your money as punishment. You can also claim the tautological consolation of an ObamaCare hardship exemption due to ObamaCare itself.

These exemptions were supposed to go only to the truly destitute such as the homeless, bankrupts or victims of domestic violence. But this week a group of six endangered Senate Democrats importuned HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to “clarify” that the victims of ObamaCare also qualify. An excerpt from their Wednesday letter, whose signatories include New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen and Virginia’s Mark Warner, is nearby.

Read more from this story HERE.
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Utter Chaos: White House Exempts Millions From Obamacare’s Insurance Mandate, ‘Unaffordable’ Exchanges

By Avik Roy.

It’s hard to come up with new ways to describe the Obama administration’s improvisational approach to the Affordable Care Act’s troubled health insurance exchanges. But last night, the White House made its most consequential announcement yet. The administration will grant a “hardship exemption” from the law’s individual mandate, requiring the purchase of health insurance, to anyone who has had their prior coverage canceled and who “believes” that Obamacare’s offerings “are unaffordable.” These exemptions will substantially alter the architecture of the law’s insurance marketplaces. Insurers are at their wits’ end, trying to make sense of what to do next.

Here’s how we got to where we are. As many as six million Americans who purchase health coverage on their own have seen their plans canceled, because they don’t comply with Obamacare’s newly-imposed regulations. On the other hand, the bungled rollout of the law’s healthcare.gov website has meant that only tens of thousands of Americans have been able to enroll in new coverage under the law. This means that by January 1, 2014, less people will have health coverage under Obamacare than before.

The White House has been working hard to fix the problems with the exchanges, with modest success. Henry Chao, the deputy Chief Information Officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, testified to Congress in November that 30 to 40 percent of Obamacare’s exchange software had yet to be constructed. Most critically, the systems needed to pay insurers—and thereby enroll people in coverage—had not yet been built.

Read more from this story HERE.

New York Times *Finally* Tells its Readers: Obamacare is Awful for the Middle Class

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Photo Credit: Adam Jeffery

Photo Credit: Adam Jeffery

The New York Times is starting to get a bit nervous about this health care law thing.

Ginger Chapman and her husband, Doug, are sitting on the health care cliff. The cheapest insurance plan they can find through the new federal marketplace in New Hampshire will cost their family of four about $1,000 a month, 12 percent of their annual income of around $100,000 and more than they have ever paid before.

Even more striking, for the Chapmans, is this fact: If they made just a few thousand dollars less a year — below $94,200 — their costs would be cut in half, because a family like theirs could qualify for federal subsidies.

So much so that they’re now gingerly starting to tell their readers what you and I already know: “While the act clearly[*] benefits those at the low end of the income scale — and rich people can continue to afford even the most generous plans — people like the Chapmans are caught in the uncomfortable middle: not poor enough for help, but not rich enough to be indifferent to cost.” I welcome this sudden decision by the New York Times to join us here in Reality Non-Unicorn, and hope that they enjoy their visit. Indeed, the Old Grey Lady is more than welcome to settle here permanently.

Read more from this story HERE.

Top 10 Broken Obamacare Promises

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Photo credit: The Wolf/Flickr

Photo credit: The Wolf/Flickr

By Alyene Senger.

Since the passage of Obamacare in 2010, many of the President’s famous promises have been routinely broken. As he so ironically threatened in 2009, “If you misrepresent what’s in this plan, we will call you out.” To that end, here are 10 promises of Obamacare that have already been broken.

1. “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”

Reality:

Millions of Americans have lost and will lose their current coverage due to Obamacare.

4.7 million reported health insurance cancellations or changes of existing policies in 32 states.

2. “[T]hat means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.”

Reality:

Many Americans might not be able to keep their current doctor without paying extra.

Many plans offered on Obamacare’s exchanges have very limited provider networks.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: White House Photo

Photo Credit: White House Photo

Obamacare timeline: what did Obama know and when did he know it?

By Wynton Hall.

The White House and the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department claim President Barack Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius held “countless” one-on-one private meetings to work together on Obamacare.

They have, however, stonewalled requests by reporters to release the dates of the alleged and undocumented meetings–none of which appear on the official White House calendar.

On Tuesday, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) sent Sebelius a letter requesting a detailed list of the days she alleges to have met privately with Obama and blasting her “lack of transparency and disregard for straight answers.”

The reason for Obama and Sebelius’s obfuscation over the President’s level of executive leadership, oversight, and management of the Obamacare debacle is simple. If the Obama administration’s list of alleged one-on-one meetings between Obama and Sebelius contains a single meeting between April 4, 2013, and October 1, 2013, the White House is in danger of revealing President Obama to have been dishonest during his now-infamous November 14, 2013, press conference wherein he uttered this curiously worded phrase:

I was not informed directly [emphasis added] that the website would not be working as—the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, ‘Boy, this is going to be great.’ You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, ‘this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,’ a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work. So, clearly, we and I did not have enough awareness about the problems in the website.

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Administration Announces New ObamaCare Exemption

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The Obama administration, in an 11th-hour change just before the holiday break,announced a major exemption in ObamaCare that will let people who lost coverage and are struggling to get a new plan sign up for bare-bones policies.

The move Thursday to allow potentially hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for “catastrophic” coverage plans was blasted by the insurance industry as a shift that would cause “tremendous instability.”

The administration downplayed the sudden change, saying they expected it to impact fewer than 500,000 people.

Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters said, “This is a common sense clarification of the law. For the limited number of consumers whose plans have been cancelled and are seeking coverage, this is one more option.”

An administration official confirmed to Fox News that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter to Capitol Hill saying the administration was expanding the definition of catastrophic plans to deal with people who have not been able to get a new plan.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Sessions Takes Subsidy to Buy Insurance on Obamacare Exchange (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), whose congressional salary is $174,000 a year, said he has purchased health insurance on the District of Columbia small business Obamacare exchange, and will accept a taxpayer-funded subsidy to help him pay for that insurance.

“I will accept the subsidy, although it’s going to be considerably more expensive for me,” Sessions said.

Under the Affordable Care Act, private citizens who buy their health insurance in an Obamacare exchange can only get a federal subsidy if their income is less than 400 percent of the poverty level–a level of income that is currently $94,200 for a family of four.

However, as CNSNews.com has reported, a regulation issued by the Office of Personnel Management allows members of Congress, even though they are paid $174,000 per year, to get an “employer contribution” from the U.S. Treasury when they buy a health insurance plan in the exchange set up for small businesses in Washington, D.C.

That “employer contribution”–paid out of the U.S. Treasury–can run up to $11,378 per year for a family plan.

Read more from this story HERE.

5 Things You CAN’T Keep Under Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

By Ashe Schowe.

President Obama’s pledge that those who liked their health care plans could keep them wasn’t the only broken promise made when selling the health care law. The troubled rollout of Obamacare has produced a growing list of things that Americans like about their current health care experience that they may not be able to keep. Below are five examples.

1. Health insurance plans

Millions of Americans have received notices canceling their existing health plans because they did not meet the requirements of the health care law, which forced insurers to include one-size-fits-all benefit packages in all plans.

In theory, Obamacare was supposed to allow Americans to keep their plans so long as those plans weren’t acquired after March 2010, when the law’s requirements took effect. These were the “grandfathered” plans of which Obama spoke.

But on June 17, 2010, three months after Obamacare was signed into law, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation detailing a number of modest alterations that would cause plans to lose their grandfathered status, thus subjecting them to the new rules.

This is what led to many of the more than 4 million cancellation letters Americans have received across the country.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Why Signing Up For Obamacare With Healthcare.gov is Still a Security Risk

By Terence Grado.

As if the fumbled rollout of healthcare.gov wasn’t enough, it turns out that the site is also extremely susceptible to security breaches. At a recent congressional hearing over the health care law’s rollout, we found out that it could take a year to properly secure users’ personal information from potential theft.

David Kennedy, head of computer-security consulting company TrustedSec LLC, testified to Congress, saying, “There are actual, live vulnerabilities on the site now,” and that “when you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn’t appear to have happened this time.” In fact, the concern is so prevalent that when Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) asked Kennedy and two other cyber security experts if the site should be shut down until these issues were fixed, each replied “yes.”

These testimonies were provided just before the Department of Health and Human Services released a progress report highlighting the fixing of over 400 bugs and software improvements. However, the report never addressed any of the website’s security flaws.

Kennedy, who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon after the report was released, was still frustrated with their lack of focus on cyber security.

Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Senator’s Wife–a Former Software Consultant–Experiences ‘Fiasco’ Trying to Use Obamacare Website (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

When it comes to Obamacare, “many members of Congress are feeling the very same pain that the rest of America is feeling,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) told Americans in a radio address on Saturday.

Toomey said he, his wife, and three children are among those “forced” to buy government-mandated health insurance on one of the new exchanges, and last week, his wife tried to sign up the family on an Obamacare exchange website.

“Now, my wife is a very sharp woman. She’s a former computer software consultant,” Toomey said. After entering the family’s personal information, the website wouldn’t let her browse the various plans. “When she called someone and asked for help, she was told the system just wasn’t working right now and it was best to try again later.”

According to Toomey, “The fiasco my wife just faced with the health care website is being experienced by Americans across the country when they try to sign up for health insurance. If this were just a matter of a slow-moving computer glitch, well, then maybe that would be excusable, but it’s much more than that.

“It’s been reported that perhaps as many as one third of those who have been able to complete the online enrollment process might not actually have insurance coverage at all. Apparently, the enrollment information isn’t always being transmitted to the insurers…Can you imagine going to your doctor or to a hospital in January only to find out you’re not actually insured?”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obamacare Disinformation Runs Deep – Sold On ‘A Trinity of Lies”

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

‘Obamacare was sold on a trinity of lies.”

That ornate phrase, more suitable for the Book of Revelations or perhaps the next installment of Game of Thrones, comes from my National Review colleague Rich Lowry. But I like it. Most people know the first deception in the triumvirate of deceit: “If you like your health insurance you can keep it, period.” The second leg in the tripod of deception was “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

But the third plank in the triad of disinformation hasn’t gotten much attention: Obamacare will save you, me, and the country a lot of money. This lie took several forms.

First, Obama promised on numerous occasions that the average family of four will save $2,500 a year in premiums. Where did that number come from? Three Harvard economists wrote a memo in 2007 in which they claimed that then-Senator Obama’s health-care plan would reduce national health-care spending by $200 billion. Then, according to the New York Times, the authors “divided [$200 billion] by the country’s population, multiplied for a family of four, and rounded down slightly to a number that was easy to grasp: $2,500.”

In September, the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used far more rigorous methods to predict that Obamacare would increase national health-care spending by $621 billion. Using Obama’s own math, that would mean — according to Chris Conover, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and Duke University — each family of four in America will spend an additional $7,450 thanks to Obamacare.

Read more from this story HERE.