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The Tea-Party Plan to Delay/Defund Obamacare Was Not Only More Realistic, It Was More Compassionate

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Photo Credit: APOne of the more irritating aspects of the recent government-shutdown unpleasantness has been the “I told you so” lamentations of the defund/delay plan’s critics — as if they had anything approaching a workable alternative. I highly recommend Andrew McCarthy’s weekend column. It’s a devastating takedown of the notion that Obamacare repeal is just a multi-election Republican winning spree away. Even if we were able to achieve a Republican perfect storm, sweeping the Senate in 2014 then taking the White House in 2016, does anyone foresee a filibuster-proof Republican senate majority? Isn’t the best-case outcome of that strategy a tweaking of the law not unlike, say, welfare reforms in the 1990s — positive changes that still leave intact a trillion-dollar-per-year, failed entitlement superstructure?

As Mr. McCarthy notes, the tea-party plan was a Hail Mary pass, but those sometimes work. I will note, however, that unlike in every football game I’ve ever watched, in this case members of the offense actually joined the defense in batting down the pass.

Not only did the tea-party plan have a chance, it was far less cynical and far more compassionate than the Republican alternative. The Republican alternative to the tea-party plan boils down to this: Let the people suffer (also called ”let Obamacare implode”), then they’ll come to us, we’ll win a bunch of elections over several cycles, then we’ll make it better.

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Jon Stewart Savages Obamacare Website Fiasco (+video)

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It’s not a stretch to say that “The Daily Show” could become one of the Obama administration’s worst nightmares on Obamacare. Four in every 10 of its viewers are younger than 30 — exactly the type of people who need to sign up for the Affordable Care Act to make it work.

On Monday night, two weeks after he sparred with Human and Health Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in an interview on the show, Jon Stewart went hard again after the rollout of the law…

“Yes, apparently the HealthCare.gov website has 99 problems, but a glitch is all of them,” Stewart said.

Stewart seemed baffled by how some of the website’s most basic functions — even the calculator — won’t work. He also dismissed how Democrats “are trying to spin this turd,” like when Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday that the glitches are a good sign of the strong demand.

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Super Bowl Champ Baltimore Ravens Getting Paid $130,000 to Promote Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP/Charlie RiedelDespite a decision by the NFL to ignore the administration’s pleas to promote Obamacare, the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens have decided to go all in — in exchange for a $130,000 contract, according to documents unearthed by a public watchdog group.

Judicial Watch told Secrets that the team was recruited by Maryland state officials to help it sell Obamacare, the new health care insurance program that has run into mammoth computer and bureaucratic troubles in its first three weeks.

The state previously announced its plans but the size of the check was not released. Judicial Watch received a copy of the agreement between the 2013 football champs and the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange.

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Harry Reid: Obamacare First Step to Single-Payer System

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Photo Credit: APAs the nation enters the third week of the Obamacare health exchange implementation, it’s worth taking a second look at some interesting comments made in August by one of the chief architects of the law.

In short, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., never really thought the exchanges would work.

He just sees the Affordable Care Act as the first step to a fully government-run health care system, something that could be easier to achieve after the glitch-riddled, problematic opening of the federal health insurance exchanges this month.

During an appearance on a Las Vegas PBS program in August, Reid said he sees a national single-payer health system as the natural next step for health care in America. Reid said the nation had to “work its way past” insurance-based health care, according to a recap provided by the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

“What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.

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CBS’s Dickerson: White House Risks ‘Credibility Death Spiral’ Over ‘Total Fiasco’ of ObamaCare Site (+video)

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Photo Credit: newsbusters.orgJohn Dickerson could not have been more blunt on Monday’s CBS This Morning about the political damage HealthCare.gov’s well-established technical difficulties is already causing President Obama: “It’s been far worse than a glitch. It’s been a total fiasco, as Senator McCain said. And the problem here is that the administration could get into, sort of, a credibility death spiral.”

The liberal political director, who is usually an Obama apologist, also surprisingly acknowledged that conservatives were right in their longstanding criticisms of ObamaCare: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]

JOHN DICKERSON:

There has always been charges from the right that the President’s health care promises didn’t turn out to be true. But then, some of those charges turned out to have some merit. The President said, if you had your own health care plan and if you were satisfied with it, you’d be able to keep it. Well, that didn’t quite turn out to be true.

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HHS Brings in Verizon to Help HealthCare.gov

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Photo Credit: Charles Dharapak, APThe international telecommunications company Verizon has been tasked with helping the government fix the federal health exchange, USA TODAY has learned.

An informed source in the telecommunications industry said Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions division has been asked by the Department of Health and Human Services to improve the performance of the HealthCare.gov site, which is a key component of the Affordable Care Act. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made official.

HHS office said Sunday the department would reach outside its government contractors to civilian companies that might be able to solve HealthCare.gov’s problems more quickly.

“Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov,” an HHS blog post said on Sunday.

HHS did not respond to a request for confirmation about Verizon. The company also declined to comment.

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Shock Claim: HealthCare.Gov Needs 5,000,000 Lines of Code Rewritten to Work Properly

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Photo Credit: Liberty News This is getting uglier by the day. Not only did Government waste more money than necessary to develop the first iPhone in creating the goliath lemon website HealthCare.Gov, it appears they’re about to spend yet another round of massive money trying to fix it. In fact, according to the New York Times, up to 5,000,000 lines of code need to be rewritten.

In interviews, experts said the technological problems of the site went far beyond the roadblocks to creating accounts that continue to prevent legions of users from even registering. Indeed, several said, the login problems, though vexing to consumers, may be the easiest to solve. One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.

“The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later,” said one person involved in the repair effort…

Government at work.

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Tech ‘Surge’ to Tackle Obamacare Websites

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Photo Credit: APThe Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.

The unusual Sunday 600-word blog post from HHS was the first update in more than a week on the many failings of an expensive website that HHS itself described as “frustrating for many Americans.” But it didn’t specify who the administration had called in, or when the American people would see clear-cut results on Healthcare.gov.

“We’re kind of thinking of it as a tech ‘surge,’” an HHS official told POLITICO.

The Health and Human Services statement didn’t explain everything that’s wrong, or give technical details about the repairs underway. It outlined some steps being taken to fix the site, including updates with “new code that includes bug fixes.” The department also says it’s installing monitors to catch parts of the website that are proving the most troublesome for consumers. And it also said it had seen some improvements in wait times and consumer access to the website, the online portal to health insurance exchanges or marketplaces the federal government is running in 36 states.

The administration said one essential component — the federal data hub — is working as hoped. That hub is crucial. It links federal agencies to determine an applicant’s eligibility for Obamacare coverage and subsidies. States running their own exchanges have to be able to draw on that data as well, and some of them have been doing so successfully.

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Obamacare Seeks to Segregate Patients, Doctors by Race

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race.

Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities.

While the 2010 Patient Protecion and Affordable Care Act’s language on diversity sounds innocuous, a review of the frankly separatist thinking of the law’s ardent supporters indicates Obamacare is aiming for a health care system that puts political correctness above the struggle against illness and death.

A 2009 report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) examining the House and Senate bill eventually signed by President Barack Obama advocates pairing patients and doctors of the same race, a goal toward which the law channels taxpayer dollars.

“Research suggests that health care providers’ diagnostic and treatment decisions, as well as their feelings about patients, are influenced by patients’ race or ethnicity,” the CAP report reads. “Several studies have shown that racial concordance is substantially and positively related to patient satisfaction.”

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Republican Senator Says Obamacare Would Have Killed Him

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Photo Credit: Sue Ogrocki/APOklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, recovering from a recent quadruple bypass, is now using the heart surgery in his attacks on Obamacare.

After going in for a routine colonoscopy, doctors found Inhofe’s arteries were so clogged he barely made it onto the operating table, he said in comments airing on journalist Aaron Klein’s WABC radio show tonight.

The 79-year-old suggested that if he had been in a part of the world with “socialized medicine like Obama is trying to impose upon America,” the operation never would have happened.

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