Tag Archives: Obama

Was Obama lying to you about keeping your health care plan?

Consider this article in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Among President Obama’s core health-care promises was that Americans can keep their current coverage if they like it. Among the reasons that a new ObamaCare squall blows in every other day is that this claim simply is not true, as people are discovering.

The latest fracas was incited by Janet Adamy’s scoop in the Journal this week that McDonald’s Corp. may be forced to cancel its current coverage for 29,500 employees as a result of ObamaCare. McDonald’s told Health and Human Services regulators that new mandates will make its plans “economically prohibitive” and cause “a huge disruption” unless it gets a waiver.

[…]At issue in the McDonald’s dust-up is a type of low-cost, low-benefit insurance known as “mini-med.” These plans cover most medical services but generally have an annual deductible or benefit cap between $1,000 and $10,000. Unlike more comprehensive plans, there’s no catastrophic coverage. Essentially, the very low premiums—under $100 a month—amount to prepaying for routine expenses like office checkups and E.R. visits.

Around 2.5 million consumers are covered by “mini-med” policies, most of them concentrated in low-wage industries like fast food, hospitality and retail that have large numbers of part-time or temporary workers. In the case of the restaurants, 75% of the workforce turns over every year and nearly half are under age 25. Mini-med plans are a temporary stopgap for businesses that have low margins and face high labor and health costs.

But Democrats hate mini-med and other skinny-benefit plans, calling them “underinsurance.” ObamaCare is meant to run them out of the market by mandating benefits, eliminating coverage caps and certain technical rules about how premiums must be spent. This despite the fact that Arkansas, Connecticut and Tennessee sponsor their own mini-med plans for state residents as better than having no insurance at all.

In other words, the choice is between relatively affordable coverage that isn’t as generous as Democrats think it should be and dumping coverage entirely. McDonald’s may eventually offer the high-cost plans that Ms. Sebelius favors, or get its waiver, but many of its less profitable or smaller competitors won’t. While subsidized ObamaCare options will be available in 2014, those costs will merely be transferred to taxpayers.

Radical pro-abortion extremist Kathleen Sebelius is in the news lately, intimidating private businesses for refusing to make bricks without straw.

Michelle Malkin wrote about it.

Excerpt:

In February, the White House coordinated a demonization campaign against Anthem Blue Cross in California for raising rates. Obama singled out the company in a “60 Minutes” interview, and Sebelius sent a nasty-gram demanding that Anthem “justify” its rate hikes to the federal government. A private company trying to survive in the marketplace was forced to “explain” itself to federal bureaucrats and career politicians who have never run a business (successful or otherwise) in their lives. Sebelius went even further. She called on Anthem to provide public disclosure on how the rate increases would be spent —  a mandate that no other private companies must follow.

We already have a federal pay czar requiring companies to justify their pay raises and claiming authority to claw back bonuses already paid. Will the White House next demand that other businesses —  not just health insurers —  justify price increases deemed unreasonable, excessive or “extraordinary”?

On Capitol Hill, Democratic chief inquisitor Henry Waxman trained his sights on executives from Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon and AT&T in a brass-knuckled effort to silence companies speaking out about the cost implications and financial burdens of Obamacare. He scheduled an April 21 show trial of corporate heads who dutifully reported writedowns related to the Obamacare mandates. Obama Commerce Secretary Gary Locke joined in on the witch-hunt, pummeling the companies on the White House blog and TV airwaves for their “premature” and “irresponsible” disclosures.

After the Democrats’ own congressional staff pointed out that the companies “acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards” in submitting filings that were required by law, Waxman called off the hounds. But it was a temporary reprieve. Sebelius’ threat last week against individual market health insurers who raise rates to cope with new federal coverage mandates will be far from this desperate administration’s last.

As health costs skyrocket, doctors abandon the profession, hospitals lay off workers and private insurers shut down, the only way to quell the Obamacare backlash will be through an even more thuggish campaign to demonize, marginalize and silence nationwide dissent.

Here are some amusing responses to her Soviet-style bullying from Wall Street Journal readers.

Now you know why companies are terrified of government – and why they aren’t hiring here. Maybe they are hiring abroad, but not here.

Democrats don’t understand the effects of their policies – the purpose of the policies they enact is not to make our lives better. The purpose of their policies is to make them feel good about themselves. Their good intentions matter more than actual results. They think they are morally superior, and they balk when we don’t worship them for failing to understand economic realities. “But we are good people with good intentions”, they say, “you’re too stupid to run your own lives – you need our advanced training in socialism to make your lives better”. It’s not good enough.

Five of Obama’s radical leftists judicial nominees approved by Democrats

Here’s the post by Hans Bader on the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Five radicals have been approved for judgeships by the Senate Judiciary Committee, voting along party lines.

The committee held over for a future vote one controversial nominee, Judge Robert Chatigny.  Chatigny unsuccessfully tried to block the execution of a serial murderer and rapist known as the Roadside Strangler based on the ridiculous argument that the murderer’s “sexual sadism” was supposedly a mitigating factor. Chatigny presided over that case as a trial judge even though he had briefly represented the Roadside Strangler, creating an obvious conflict of interest.

Chatigny’s nomination to an appeals court had previously been approved by the committee earlier this year, but it died when the full Senate failed to vote on his nomination due to public opposition. He was then renominated by President Obama, along with other controversial nominees whose nominations had also earlier died in the full Senate, like Edward Chen, Goodwin Liu, Louis Butler, and Jack O’Connell.

The rest of the article talks about what makes each of the 5 judges radical.

Here are a couple:

The committee rubberstamped Edward Chen, a fervent advocate of racial preferences who unsuccessfully challenged a provision of the California Constitution banning racial discrimination and preferences.

[…]It once again approved radical law professor Goodwin Liu, who wrongly thinks that the Constitution requires some forms of welfare. Liu has no experience trying cases at all, even though judges are supposed to have “substantial courtroom and trial experience.” Liu claims that “‘free enterprise, private ownership of property, and limited government” are right-wing concepts and ideological “code words.”

Obama is appointing people who will disregard the law and the Constitution so that he can do whatever he wants – an Imperial Presidency. Even Bruce Ackerman, a liberal law professor from Yale, says that Obama’s appointment of radical anti-business leftist Elizabeth Warren is another step toward an Imperial Presidency. (H/T Competitive Enterprise Institute)

Tea Party uncovers massive voter fraud in Houston

Story from Fox News. (H/T The Blog Prof, Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

“It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers.

Like most voter watchdog groups, she said, her group started small. They decided to investigate voting fraud in general, not just at the polling places, and at first they weren’t even sure what to look for — and where to look for it.

“The first thing we started to do was look at houses with more than six voters in them” Engelbrecht said, because those houses were the most likely to have fraudulent registrations attached to them. “Most voting districts had 1,800 if they were Republican and 2,400 of these houses if they were Democratic . . .

“But we came across one with 24,000, and that was where we started looking.”

Click through to find out who was responsible for the voter fraud. Ot is it called “community organizing” now?