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And You Thought the NSA was Bad: Obamacare Data Hub a ‘Honey Pot’ for Leftist ID Thieves, Warn Critics (+videos)

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Photo Credit: National Review Obamacare’s Branch of the NSA

By John Fund. President Obama has had a poor record of job creation, but at least one small economic sector is doing well: community organizing.

The Department of Health and Human Services is about to hire an army of “patient navigators” to inform Americans about the subsidized insurance promised by Obamacare and assist them in enrolling. These organizers will be guided by the new Federal Data Hub, which will give them access to reams of personal information compiled by federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. “The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic,” Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute and Stephen T. Parente, a University of Minnesota finance professor, wrote in USA Today. No wonder that there are concerns about everything from identity theft to the ability of navigators to use the system to register Obamacare participants to vote.

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn’t satisfied with the $54 million in public funds allocated for navigators this year, so she tried to raise money from health-industry executives for Enroll America, the liberal nonprofit group leading the PR push for Obamacare. She had to retreat under withering criticism that she was shaking down companies that were dependent on government, a clear conflict of interest.

Because 34 states have declined to set up their own insurance “exchanges,” the job of guiding exchange enrollees in those states has been left to Washington. The identity of the groups who will get the Sebelius grants isn’t yet known, but Politico reports they are likely to include Planned Parenthood, senior-citizen advocacy organizations, and churches. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare data hub a ‘honey pot’ for ID thieves, warn critics

By Paul Bedard. The data hub President Obama’s health care team is creating to exchange personal health and financial information on Obamacare users will be a ripe target for computer hackers and identity thieves, charge critics who claim it hasn’t been tested for security flaws.

“It’s the greatest collection of private identification information ever assembled on Americans that will be put into one place,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan, who chairs a House cybersecurity subcommittee. “It is every bit of sensitive information one would need to know to completely take over the identification of a person,” said the Pennsylvania lawmaker.

The Obamacare data hub, he added, “creates a honey pot and the day that it goes online it is going to be a target for hackers and others and they are unprepared to protect the system.”

At an oversight hearing last week, administration officials said that the hub, still under creation, will be used to verify Obamacare applications. It will share information among federal agencies, like the IRS, and state agencies. A separate system will keep store key information such as income, Social Security numbers, email addresses, and even pregnancy status of Obamacare users.

Officials called on the public and Congress to “trust” that the information will be protected from hackers, but several lawmakers balked. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesMidlands Voices: Stop Obamacare in its tracks

By Ben Sasse. The author has served as chief of staff for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as assistant U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. Currently president of Midland University, he has been exploring a U.S. Senate candidacy.

Obamacare is a ticking time bomb for Democrats in the 2014 elections. Nobody knows this better than President Barack Obama, which is why over the Fourth of July holiday weekend he unilaterally decided to delay its controversial employer mandate provision until after the midterm elections.

No wonder: The $2,000 per-worker fine is disastrously unpopular. Already, employers are laying off workers and dramatically cutting others’ hours in an effort to skirt the new penalty. The fact that this perfectly predictable development surprises many in Washington only underscores that they didn’t really read this 2,300-page monstrosity before they passed it.

Desperate for any appearance of victory, Republican leaders have decided to match the president’s delay with one of their own: proposing legislation to delay for a year the mandate for individuals. Perhaps useful, perhaps not. Well-meaning people can differ about legislative strategy.

But if Republicans don’t have a larger plan to actually oppose this unprecedented power grab in a way the American people will understand, then they will have given up the ghost on actually turning back the slew of new job-killing bureaucracies. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesGOP Senator says coalition to block and defund Obamacare is growing, names names

By Becket Adams. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told TheBlaze Monday he has recruited more than a dozen Senate Republicans to help him defund President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law.

Fifteen Republican senators, including Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Ted Cruz (Texas), John Cornyn (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.), James Inhofe (Okla.), David Vitter (La.), Roger Wicker (Miss.), John Thune (S.D.), and Chuck Grassley (Iowa), will block a continuing resolution to keep the government funded beyond Sept. 30 if it includes funding for Obamacare, Lee said.

“The president has said that he’s not willing and not able to enforce Obamacare as it was written,” Sen. Lee told TheBlaze in a phone interview. “And so he has chosen instead to enforce this law selectively.”

“He has picked out two things that he has said he won’t enforce. One is the employer mandate and the other is the requirement that the government obtain some kind of proof for those who are claiming eligibility for Obamacare exchange subsidies,” he added.

The senator continued, arguing that the president “doesn’t have the power” to selectively enforce and amend laws passed by Congress. Read more from this story HERE.

Judge Grants Exemption for Hobby Lobby in ObamaCare Challenge

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By Associated Press. Hobby Lobby Inc. was given a temporary exemption Friday from a requirement in the new federal health care law to offer insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency birth control methods or face steep fines.

U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton issued the preliminary injunction for the Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain and stayed the case until Oct. 1 to give the federal government time to consider filing an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ruling was welcomed by the Christian owners of Hobby Lobby and its sister company, the Mardel Christian bookstore chain. Attorneys for the Green family have argued that their religious beliefs are so deeply rooted that having to provide every form of birth control would violate their conscience.

“We’re just very excited. This is a great step for us,” Hobby Lobby president Steve Green said.

Members of the Green family say they believe life begins at conception, and oppose birth control methods that can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, such as an intrauterine device or forms of emergency contraception. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WNDCourts prevent feds from enforcing abortion-drug mandate

By WND. A federal court Friday granted a preliminary injunction to Hobby Lobby, preventing the Obama administration from enforcing the Obamacare abortion-drug mandate against the Christian-run company while the case is in progress.

The case brought by Hobby Lobby is just one of dozens pending in courts now over the Obamacare demand that employers provide abortifacients to their employees – irrespective of whether such actions violate the employers’ beliefs.

The Becket Fund, which is representing the company, said the court found there is a “substantial public interest in ensuring that no individual or corporation has their legs cut out from under them while these difficult issues are resolved.”

“The tide has turned against the HHS mandated,” said a spokesman for the organization.

Matt Bowman, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said every American, including family business owners, should be free to live and do business according to their faith. Read more from this story HERE.

Disaster for Patient Care Looming: 60% of Doctors Say Providers will Retire Earlier Due to Obamacare

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Photo Credit: WNDIn a survey by a top research firm, six in 10 physicians said it is likely many doctors will retire earlier than planned in the next one to three years.

The same percentage say the practice of medicine is in jeopardy as medical experts lose control of their clinics and compensation with the implementation of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, or Obamacare.

A spokeswoman for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Jane Orient, was not surprised.

She told WND that doctors already have started leaving the profession through early retirement. Among those who remain, some will seek alternatives to what they see coming in the federal government’s takeover of health care.

“I think it’s a disaster for patients,” she said. “They may lose the doctor they relied on all their lives.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Dr. Ben Carson: This Is the Beginning of the Collapse of Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: APBy Greg Richter. Delaying implementation of key parts of the healthcare law and losing the support of labor unions are just the beginning of trouble for Obamacare, says Dr. Ben Carson.

“It’s gonna be a lot worse than this. This is the beginning of the collapse,” the retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon said on Fox News Channel’s “Your World” on Tuesday.

“Usually when you roll out a big program, you roll it out bit by bit. You determine what’s working. You can change things,” Carson said. “But to try to roll out something this massive without really knowing what the intricacies are is quite foolish.” Read more from this story HERE.

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photo credit: azrainmanGOP-controlled House to vote Wednesday on delaying key parts of ObamaCare

By Fox News. The Republican-controlled House will vote Wednesday on delaying key parts of ObamaCare, the party’s latest effort to dismantle the law amid distress signals from inside the administration.

The lawmakers will vote on bills to delay the start of the law’s separate employer and individual mandates, which respectively require smaller businesses and Americans to purchase insurance next year or face penalties.

The Obama administration earlier this month delayed the start of the employer mandate, saying the decision was in response to business owners expressing concerns about the law’s complex reporting requirements.

Late Tuesday, the White House issued a threat to veto the Republican bills, saying their passage would help “further efforts to repeal a law that is already helping millions of Americans stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, millions more who are getting free preventive care that catches illness early on, and thousands of children with pre-existing conditions who are now covered.”

Political analysts said that delaying the start until 2015 was an attempt to slow Republicans during next year’s elections from pinning ObamaCare problems on Democratic candidates — particularly those in Congress who supported the 2010 law and are seeking re-election. Read more from this story HERE.

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74% of small businesses will fire workers, cut hours under Obamacare

By Paul Bedard. Despite the administration’s controversial decision to delay forcing companies to join Obamacare for a year, three-quarters of small businesses are still making plans to duck the costly law by firing workers, reducing hours of full-time staff, or shift many to part-time, according to a sobering survey released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Small businesses expect the requirement to negatively impact their employees. Twenty-seven percent say they will cut hours to reduce full time employees, 24 percent will reduce hiring, and 23 percent plan to replace full time employees with part-time workers to avoid triggering the mandate,” said the Chamber business survey provided to Secrets.

Under Obamacare, just 30 hours — not the nationally recognized 40 hours — is considered full-time. Companies with 50 full-time workers or more are required to provide health care, or pay a fine.

The administration recently decided to wait a year before businesses had to comply, but many are trying to get ready anyway. The president did not delay the mandate that Americans must have health insurance or pay a fine, however.

The Chamber’s second quarter small business survey found that just 30 percent are ready for the law and even understand what is required. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APLooking to keep GOP out of health care decisions, Obama threatens to veto bill backing his own delay

By Tom Howell Jr. President Obama has threatened to veto a House bill that would put into law a decision he made two weeks ago.

In a statement, the White House said the Obama administration “strongly opposes” a pair of Republican-led bills to delay the employer mandate and individual mandate within the president’s signature health care law.

The administration quietly announced July 2 in a pair of blog posts that it would delay by one year, to 2015, penalties tied to a mandate requiring firms with the equivalent of 50 or more full-time workers to provide insurance or pay fines, citing the business community’s concerns about complex reporting requirements.

Eyeing an opportunity to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, House Republicans cued up votes for Wednesday on bills to codify the White House’s delay and match it with a delay of the provision requiring most Americans to obtain some form of health insurance.

The votes will force Democrats to align with the president or distance themselves from the overhaul in the wake of its recent stumbles. Read more from this story HERE.

Teamsters, Other Unions Now Protest the Obamacare Nightmare They Helped Create (+video)

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Drew Zahn. Some of America’s top labor unions – including the influential Teamsters – have suddenly realized Obamacare is bad deal, and they’re suffering some serious buyer’s remorse.

“In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure [the Obamacare] vision,” wrote three leading labor unions in an open letter to Congressional Democrats last week. “Now this vision has come back to haunt us.”

The letter, signed by James Hoffa of the Teamsters, as well as the presidents of the UFCW and UNITE-HERE, demands Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “fix” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – also known as “Obamacare” – before it “destroy[s] the very health and well-being of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.”

“When you and the president sought our support for the Affordable Care Act, you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat,” the unions wrote to Reid and Pelosi. “Unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

According to the letter, Obamacare is laced with “perverse incentives” that create “unintended consequences” and “nightmare scenarios.” Read more from this story HERE.

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‘Unintended consequences’ causing ‘nightmare scenarios’

By Avik Roy. The union leaders are concerned that Obamacare’s employer mandate incentivizes smaller companies to shift their workers to part-time status, because employers are not required to provide health coverage to part-time workers. “We have a problem,” they write, and “you need to fix it.”

“The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe,” they continue. “Perverse incentives are causing nightmare scenarios. First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.”

What surprises me about this is that union leaders are pretty strategic when it comes to employee benefits. It was obvious in 2009 that Obamacare’s employer mandate would incentivize this shift. Why didn’t labor unions fight it back then? Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare Delay Has Serious Implications

Avik Roy appeared before the Health Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee to testify on the White House’s one-year delay in implementing the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”), which requires firms to offer health coverage to their full-time workers:

GOP Address: Permanently Delay ‘Massive, Burdensome’ Obamacare for Everybody (+video)

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Obamacare should be permanently delayed for everybody, not just for businesses, because it is “so massive, burdensome, bureaucratic and confusing that it’s collapsing under its own weight,” Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi said in Saturday’s GOP weekly address.

Enzi pointed out that in 2009, he warned that President Barack Obama and Democrats were moving ahead with a healthcare reform plan that would cost all Americans for generations to come, and said his predictions are now coming true.

“All across the country health insurance rates are skyrocketing,” the Wyoming Republican said. “Employees are losing coverage through their employers. Families are struggling to cope with higher costs and less choice. Businesses aren’t hiring full-time employees.”

He said nobody likes to be right when their predictions come true in ways that are harmful, but “it’s time to admit that this partisan experiment in government-run health care is failing.”

When the Obama administration pulled back on the employer mandate, delaying it by an extra year, it had to admit that one of the key pieces of the law isn’t working.

Read more from this story HERE.

Federal Appeals Court Rejects Christian University’s Request to Overturn ObamaCare

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Photo Credit: APA federal appeals court in Virginia on Thursday rejected a Christian university’s bid to overturn the Obama administration’s health care law.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling dismissing Liberty University’s lawsuit.

Liberty argued the employer health insurance mandate of the Affordable Care Act violates the school’s religious rights by requiring it to provide coverage for abortion inducing drugs. The appeals court found no merit in the claim.

“Plaintiffs present no plausible claim that the act substantially burdens their free exercise of religion, by forcing them to facilitate or support abortion or otherwise,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote in the opinion. He wrote the law “allows an individual to obtain, and an employer to offer, a plan that covers no abortion services at all.”

The opinion was joined by Judges Andre M. Davis and Diana Gribbon Motz. Davis and Wynn are Obama appointees, and Motz was appointed by Bill Clinton. The same panel in 2011 ruled Liberty’s lawsuit was premature. The Supreme Court upheld the health care law in another case in June 2012, and in November the justices ordered the appeals court to reconsider Liberty’s case in light of that ruling.

Read more from this story HERE.

July 3: The Day Big Government Finally Imploded

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Photo Credit: Douglas JonesMark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded.

July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog post that the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate would be delayed one year. Something about the “complexity of the requirements.” The Fourth’s fireworks couldn’t hold a candle to the sound of the U.S. government finally hitting the wall.

Since at least 1789, America’s conservatives and liberals have argued about the proper role of government. Home library shelves across the land splinter and creak beneath the weight of books arguing the case for individual liberty or for government-led social justice. World Wrestling smackdowns are nothing compared with Hayek vs. Rawls.

Maybe we have been listening to the wrong experts. Philosophers and pundits aren’t going to tell us anything new about government. The one-year rollover of ObamaCare because of its “complexity” suggests it’s time to call in the physicists, the people who study black holes and death stars. That’s what the federal government looks like after expanding ever outward for the past 224 years.

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law’s theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Mike Lee: Defund Obamacare or Shut Down the Government

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Photo Credit: APSen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, thinks President Obama’s delay of key provisions of Obamacare could force Senate Democrats to defend the unpopular law during the upcoming congressional debate on a new continuing resolution to fund the government through the 2014 election.

“If congressional Democrats want to oppose appropriations bills without additional Obamacare funding, shut down the government, and side with the president and Big Business against the American people, then it’s their choice,” Lee said.

“But three years in, even the president himself has now admitted that Obamacare won’t work. The only responsible choice now is to protect the country from Obamacare’s looming disaster, start over and finally begin work on real health care reform.”

Lee is responding to the Treasury Department’s July 5th announcement that it will delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate on businesses to provide health insurance to workers.

The new CR would be the fourth such stop-gap funding measure since Congress failed to adopt an annual budget in 2010. The government is currently operating on a CR that expires Sept. 30.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Obamacare Train Wreck Continues: Now, the HHS Fraud Prevention Mandate Thrown Out (+videos)

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Photo Credit: ThinkstockHHS gives up on Obamacare’s anti-fraud measures

By Philip Klein. One of the biggest administrative hurdles facing Obamacare was the ambitious plan to verify the income and insurance status of applicants for federal health coverage subsidies. In theory, on Oct. 1 of this year, a prospective beneficiary of Obamacare was supposed to be able to visit a website like Orbitz, enter basic information, and wait as multiple state and federal government databases communicated with one another to confirm in real time the applicant’s income level, and then display the level of subsidy to which the applicant was entitled, if any. It was a level of technological sophistication unlike anything ever attempted by the government. Now, with less than three months to go before Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges are set to begin enrolling applicants, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services is throwing up its hands. Just as it did with the employer mandate, the administration has announced it would delay the implementation of these anti-fraud procedures due to the administrative difficulty.

In a regulation released Friday and flagged by Washington Post reporters Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar, the administration will now rely on self-reported data. You read that correctly. A man who earns $50,000 per year and gets insurance through his employer could log on to the new government website and say he earns $20,000 and gets no insurance through his employer, and the government would not even attempt to confirm that the information is accurate before forking over generous taxpayer subsidies. It’s a recipe for rampant fraud, which is already widespread in Medicare and Medicaid.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Obamacare was simply bad legislating

By Timothy P. Carney. President Obama’s signature legislative achievement was simply a bad bit of legislating. The administration’s decision to postpone the employer health insurance mandate is just the latest evidence that this law was poorly built.

An analogy: You may think Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings are beautiful or ugly. But that’s a matter of taste, and it’s a different question from whether they are built soundly.

Analogously, you may share Obama’s views of government or reject it, but that’s a separate issue from whether this law was well made. With Obamacare, the architects used nails where screws were needed, and the angles aren’t quite right. This structure can’t bear its own weight.

The employer mandate was always a bad idea, and not only from the perspective of economic liberty. Liberal health-care wonks knew that the employer-based health-insurance system was a big part of our problem. If people get their insurance from work, then they lose their insurance when they switch jobs, exacerbating the problem that insurers typically don’t cover preexisting conditions. Also, when the HR director is doing the insurance shopping for all employees, insurers don’t face real competitive pressure.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: TownhallWhat the Employer Mandate Delay Says About Obamacare’s Dysfunction

By Kevin Glass. The Obama Administration’s decision to delay implementation of one of Obamacare’s big regulations – the employer mandate – led to some progressives actually cheering. “Delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do,” wrote the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. “In my view, the Administration should have gone further than delaying the employer mandate. They should have also proposed a bill to remove it entirely,” writes economist Austin Frakt. Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler writes, “I think you can make a decent case that the administration is actually doubling down on the most crucial and politically high-valence part of the law.”

These have come along with typical blame-Republicans condemnations. If the employer mandate is so bad, why wouldn’t Congressional Republicans just team up with Democrats to repeal it entirely, for example?

These critics are largely missing the point.

President Obama promised perfection when it came to the Affordable Care Act. More insurance coverage, better health outcomes, cheaper premiums, and you can keep your health care plan. That last one was particularly key when it came to selling the whole package. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” was repeated time and again in the President’s PR campaign for the health legislation. Read more from this story HERE.