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Obamacare’s Dishonor System

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Photo Credit: National Review Perhaps you’ve heard the radio or TV commercials sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services urging seniors to report instances of Medicare fraud. There’s a number to call, along with cheerful suggestions.

The intent here seems benign enough — saving taxpayer money by catching the dishonest. One might even be tempted to praise it, were it not for what the Obama administration is doing with the other hand — issuing an engraved invitation to commit fraud when signing up for the health-care exchanges.

Obamacare is proving too unwieldy even for the greediest of big-government centralizers in the Obama administration. With only months to go before their Frankenstein was set to get its jolt of electricity in January 2014, they’ve announced a series of delays. The employer mandate, whereby businesses with 50 or more employees must certify that they are providing insurance that meets government requirements, will be delayed by a year.

When you design a Rube Goldberg health-care system with a thousand moving parts — subsidies, mandates, exchanges, reporting requirements, sliding scales, and varying eligibility for Medicaid, expanded Medicaid, and so forth — it doesn’t take much to bring the whole contraption to a halt. By delaying the employer mandate, the Obama administration undercut its own complex system for calculating people’s eligibility for health exchanges. In theory, it was supposed to be based on family income, family size, the lack of employer-provided insurance, eligibility for other government programs, and more. (For further edification, consult the 600-page rule HHS issued on July 5.)

Read more from this story HERE.

Congress Wins Relief on Obamacare Health Plan Subsidies

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Congress has won some partial relief for lawmakers and their staffs from the “Obamacare” health reforms that it passed and subjected itself to three years ago.

In a ruling issued on Wednesday, U.S. lawmakers and their staffs will continue to receive a federal contribution toward the health insurance that they must purchase through soon-to-open exchanges created by President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law.

The decision by the Office of Personnel Management, with Obama’s blessing, will prevent the largely unintended loss of healthcare benefits for 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives and thousands of Capitol Hill staff.

When Congress passed the health reform law known as Obamacare in 2010, an amendment required that lawmakers and their staff members purchase health insurance through the online exchanges that the law created. They would lose generous coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

The amendment’s author, Republican Senator Charles Grassley, argued that if Obamacare plans were good enough for the American public, they were good enough for Congress. Democrats, eager to pass the reforms, went along with it.

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Obamacare Months Behind in Testing IT Data Security

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Photo Credit: TownhallThe federal government is months behind in testing data security for the main pillar of Obamacare: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1.

The missed deadlines have pushed the government’s decision on whether information technology security is up to snuff to exactly one day before that crucial date, the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general said in a report.

As a result, experts say, the exchanges might open with security flaws or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.

“They’ve removed their margin for error,” said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. “There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.”

The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance.

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Heritage Foundation: WH ‘Flouting the Law’ with Obamacare Subsidies for Congress

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Photo Credit: BreitbartPolitico reported that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will issue a ruling next week that will allow the federal government to subsidize the insurance plans Congressmen and their aides will be forced to buy on government healthcare exchanges due to Obamacare.

The news came just hours after the Heritage Foundation released an embargoed study to reporters that found there was no legal way for the administration to offer subsidies for Members of Congress and their aides without passing a legislative “fix.”

The Obama administration may have tried to preempt the release of that study; one of the study’s co-authors insisted to Breitbart News on Friday that no matter how creative the Obama administration gets, there does not seem to be a legal manner in which the federal government can grant the Obamacare subsidies.

Ed Haislmaier and Robert E. Moffitt, both of whom are Senior Research Fellows in the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney in private practice who served as General Counsel of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985, co-authored the study, titled, “Congress in the Obamacare Trap: No Easy Escape.”

Haislmaier emphasized to Breitbart News that “we don’t see a legal avenue, no matter how creative, for them.”

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The End of Republican Party

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They call it the Grand Old Party. It may be old, but it’s anything but grand right now.

And the Republicans who replaced the Whigs may soon be as relevant as Andrew Jackson’s party if they are not very careful.

What do I mean?

America is at a politically critical turning point – a point of no return.

If Republicans don’t use the power they have in the House of Representatives to defeat amnesty and defund Obamacare, they risk political obsolescence – as well as a future America with no chance to return to constitutionally limited government.

The way things look right now, Republicans do not have the will or intestinal fortitude even to fight back, let alone play the cards voters overwhelmingly gave them in 2010.

Maybe Republicans need a reminder: They control one-half of a bicameral legislature – the half needed to approve all funding for all programs, agencies, departments and initiatives of the federal government.

Republicans have the power to kill Obamacare by defunding it. They don’t need a single Democratic vote.

Read more from this story HERE.

Levin on Congressional Obamacare ‘Fix’: They are So LUCKY We Don’t Storm Capitol Hill (He’s Not Advocating That)

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Mark Levin explained tonight how Congress has gotten Obama to get one of his flunkies at the Office of Personnel Management to announce that the “government can continue to make a contribution to the health care premiums of members of Congress and their aides”.

This is something that wouldn’t have occurred had if Obamacare were implemented as written. But it would have cost our dear leaders thousands of dollars in premium costs so they got Obama to override the law on their behalf.

Read more and listen to audio HERE.

Rep. Graves: Grassroots Need to Keep Up Pressure to Defund Obamacare

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Photo Credit: APRep. Tom Graves (R-GA) told Breitbart News on Friday that a majority of House Republicans have now signed onto his legislation to defund Obamacare in the upcoming Continuing Resolution (CR), passing a threshold that meets the informal Hastert Rule that requires a majority of the majority to support legislation before it comes up for a vote.

“Well it sends a real strong message,” Graves said of the reaching the milestone during a phone interview on Friday morning. “I think as of yesterday we had 121 cosponsors. That’s a very rapid growth of cosponsoring, including House leadership such as Lynn Jenkins, signing onto the bill this week.”

“So, we have the majority of the majority that meets the Hastert Rule,” he explained. “We’ll see if those numbers continue to grow. Members have come up to me even this morning asking if they could sign on and where would they go to do that. I think we’re going to see the momentum continue.”

In fact, since the interview Graves conducted with Breitbart News on Friday morning, the bill picked up yet another cosponsor and is up to 122. Since there are 234 GOP members in the House, a total of 117 cosponsors are needed for any piece of legislation to cross the threshold to meet the Hastert Rule.

Graves credits a lot of the success thus far to the grassroots and Tea Party movement, which has been helping pressure members of Congress to get in the fight.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s IRS Chief Admits to Congress He Wants to Keep His Healthcare, Doesn’t Want to be Forced into Obamacare (+video)

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At congressional hearing today, the following exchange took place between Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tx) and the IRS chief, Daniel Werfel:

Congressman Johnson: “Mr. Werfel, last week your employees who are a member of the National Treasury Employee’s Union sent a form letter for union members to send in to ask they be exempt from the exchanges. Why are your employees trying to exempt themselves from the very law that you’re tasked to enforce?”

Commissioner Werfel: “I don’t want to speak for the NTEU, but I’ll offer a perspective as a federal employee myself and a federal employee at the IRS. And that is, we have right now as employees of the government, of the IRS, affordable health care coverage. I think the ACA was designed to provide an option or an alternative for individuals that do not. And all else being equal, I think if you’re an individual who is satisfied with your health care coverage, you’re probably in a better position to stick with that coverage than go through the change of moving into a different environment and going through that process.”

video:

Obama Promises to Help Congressional Staffers Avoid Obamacare

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Photo Credit: ReutersWashington has been abuzz for months over the fear and loathing that Congressional staffers have for Obamacare. Many staffers and employees on Capitol Hill have been saying they’ll have to quit Washington if they are forced into Obamacare. Now the President is promising to fix it all for them.

At the very beginning of his closed-door meeting with Senate Democrats, the President addressed staffers’ worries that Obamacare will force them to quit working in Washington, promising “I’m on it.”

Currently congressional staffers have 75 percent of their healthcare insurance paid by taxpayers, but if their Cadillac Congressional healthcare plan is ended and staffers are pushed into Obamacare, many Congressional employees fear that their insurance costs will increase by thousands of dollars a year. This cost, many say, will force them to quit working in Washington.

The Republican-sponsored amendment to Obamacare introduced by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) would require that lawmakers and their staffers must be covered by the same insurance exchanges that the rest of America will be forced into as mandated by Obama’s healthcare law. It is this amendment that staffers are protesting.

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Brent Bozell to GOP on Obamacare: “You Fund It, You Own It”

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Photo Credit: CNSNewsAt the launch of a campaign to deny any further funding for implementation of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, dubbed “You Fund it, You Own It,” Brent Bozell, chairman of ForAmerica, a non-profit 501(c) organization, said Republicans in Congress will be held accountable for their upcoming budget votes.

“This is a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment for Republicans,” Bozell said at a press conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday co-hosted by the Tea Party Patriots. “They better get religion soon.”

“The voters out there are unequivocally fed up with inaction from those who promised action,” Bozell said.

“It’s a very simple proposition,” Bozell said. “If you fund it, you own it.”

Bozell and Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, were joined by members of Congress and other grassroots groups at the event.

Read more from this story HERE.