“If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it,” Obama said. 

This is at best a half truth. You can keep it if it continues to be offered. But over time it will become uneconomical to offer those plans, and they will no longer be offered. This is by design, to FORCE everyone into Obamacare, which has higher premiums and higher deductibles. Really, Obama’s claim amounts to a lie.

Last year only 60% of employers offered one of those old plans that you are supposedly allowed to keep, if you like them. So this is hardly a universal guarantee that you can continue to have your old insurance plan.

Read the link for details.

Obamacare is an absolute, unqualified disaster. Who is going to clean up this mess?

President Obama needs a new agenda, not a better way of selling the status quo.

Even the WaPo is implicitly writing Obama is a lame duck. “If we define the success of the Obama presidency by examining some of the quantifiable facts that measure our country’s progress, it’s hard to argue that the lives of Americans have improved over the past four years or that these discouraging trends are going to be reversed anytime soon.” Unemployment has gone “from terrible (8.3 percent) to very bad (7.5 percent).” 9.5 million people have dropped out of the labor force. 15.2 million more people on food stamps. The biggest jump in national debt in our history. “His time to enact change is rapidly diminishing, and as I have referenced over the past couple weeks, he appears to be out of ideas and energy. His second-term agenda, which should be fresh and marching its way through Congress, is nowhere to be seen.” They should have just titled the column, “Massive Obama FAIL.”

The top 7% of households have increased wealth 28% since 2009. All the rest? Down 4%. So much for Obama’s “wealth spreading.” Real median household income is flat for the year. No increase. Zero. Adjusted for inflation, real median household income is down $6,000 per year (more than 10%) from the peak levels attained in 2001 and 2008. Behold the non-recovery recovery. Another Obamanomics FAIL.

“President Obama has failed to deliver on few promises as miserably as his vow to create a more transparent and open government.”

Does the rhetoric even come close to reality?

AP found that “under Obama, 17 major agencies were 50% more likely to deny FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests than under Bush.”

The presidents of the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists called out Obama for “muzzling scientists in much the same way that Bush had.”

Bloomberg tested Obama’s pledge by “sending FOIA requests for the travel records of top officials at 57 government agencies. Only about half responded.”

President Obama “has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the espionage act than all prior administrations combined.” 

This month AP released an analysis finding that the Obama administration “censored more FOIA requests on national security grounds last year than in any other year since President Obama took office.”

And this doesn’t even begin to touch the administration’s outright lying on the involvement of the Justice Department in the Fast and Furious fiasco, a project whereby weapons were transferred by our government to Mexican drug cartels. 

read more…

From the New York Times, another example of an Obamacare fail.

This is what happens when Congress doesn’t read bills before they pass them. This is what happens when authority to set rules administering programs is ceded to the President and the Executive Branch, giving him virtually dictatorial powers. 

Many families with income just above $35,000 will not be eligible for any help buying health insurance. They may well be priced out of the market. 

The Internal Revenue Service has issued a hugely disappointing ruling on how to calculate the affordability of health insurance offered by employers. Its needlessly strict interpretation of the Affordable Care Act could leave millions of Americans with modest incomes unable to afford family coverage under their employers’ health insurance but ineligible for subsidies to buy coverage elsewhere.

If they do not have coverage, they could be subject to a penalty. 

Estimates made in 2011 by respected research organizations suggested that some 2 million to 3.9 million non-working spouses and dependents would be harmed by the strict ruling. Looking only at children who were uninsured but supposed to gain coverage under health care reform, the Government Accountability Office estimated last June that 460,000 might remain uninsured because of the affordability definition, and that 1.9 million might stay uninsured if an existing children’s health insurance program is phased out as currently planned. This outcome is exactly the opposite of what health care reform is supposed to achieve.

Nearly every day I am feeling a delicious schadenfreude, reading of yet another ObamaCare provision turned into an ObamaFail. When will lawmakers learn to read these things before they vote on/sign them? I remember last year Obama told a campaign audience he needed a second term to fix ObamaCare. Have we seen any action on that front? Oh no, he’s too busy focusing like a laser on jobs! Pathetic. 

Now he claims it is a bad idea. Well, Mr. President, it was your bad idea. (By the way, not everyone agrees it is a bad idea. In the absence of agreement on other budget-cutting measures, it’s a good start.) The White House admits it was Obama’s idea in video here.

Not only was it Obama’s idea, in November 2011, only a little more than a year ago, he fought to retain them. He vowed to veto any effort to overturn the “automatic spending cuts.” He even said, “There will be no easy off-ramps on this one.” 

Now, according to the White House, “everyone agrees [sequestration] is a bad idea.” (see video link in the first paragraph)

Mr. President, whether it is or is not a bad idea, you own the sequestration. You own it. You originated it. You fought to retain it. 

If it’s now a bad idea, that’s a major flip-flop. 

poorrichardsnews:

Politico reports that Obama’s jobs council has not met officially in more than a year. 

What can you say? Pay no attention to what the President says. It may be right (a stopped clock is correct twice a day) or it may be 180 degrees opposite his true intentions. There is no substantive evidence of this President’s alleged “laser-like” focus on employment. In fact, it appears that Obamacare will be an obstacle to full-time employment with benefits — though perhaps a boon to low-paying part-time jobs with no benefits. 

It’s all talk. Pay no attention to it. I don’t. Watch what the President does, not what he says. 

Health insurance premiums rising precipitously. Surprise, surprise. The page title should be, “Because of new health law, some see sharp rise in premiums.”

Not Bush’s fault!!! Congress passed it, and they found out what was in it. “…Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted. ‘This is business as usual,’ Mr. Jones said. ‘It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,’ he said.” So either Obamacare was poorly drafted, or it was designed to fail — incompetence or sinister intent, take your pick. When businesses see huge rate increases, more of them will drop insurance and pay the fine instead. The employee will be left to find his own insurance, at greater cost, and have less money in pocket to pay for it, due to the Social Security tax increase this month. Ho ho ho, another “gift” from President Santa Claus. (This one looks like a lump of coal.)