Obamacare enrollments got off to very slow start, documents show
October 31, 2013
For 31 days now, the Obama administration has been telling us that Americans by the millions are visiting the new health insurance website, despite all its problems.
But no one in the administration has been willing to tell us how many policies have been purchased, and this may be the reason: CBS News has learned enrollments got off to an incredibly slow start.
Early enrollment figures are contained in notes from twice-a-day “war room” meetings convened within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website failed on Oct. 1. They were turned over in response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee.
The website launched on a Tuesday. Publicly, the government said there were 4.7 million unique visits in the first 24 hours. But at a meeting Wednesday morning, the war room notes say “six enrollments have occurred so far.”
Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
So the Obama administration admitted in July 2010 that Obamacare would cause people to lose their insurance.
But the mainstream media waited until after the 2012 election to report this information.
Of course to anyone who understands logic, it was obvious that Obamacare would cause people to lose their insurance. Obamacare requires all policies to cover pre-existing conditions, maternity care, treatment for heroin addiction, and several other specific things. Any policy that does not already cover these things is rendered illegal by Obamacare, so of course such policies would be canceled as a result of Obamacare. That’s just simple logic.
By waiting until after the 2012 election to report on something that the Obama administration admitted in July 2010, the mainstream media has revealed its pro-Obama bias.
Regardless of what the project is, Obama doesn’t want to do things properly. Instead, all he cares about is helping out his crony friends.
When Obama was a state Senator in Illinois, he gave tax dollars to his crony contractor friends to build 504 units of slum housing, which had mice and backed up sewage. Federal inspectors graded the condition of the housing so bad that the buildings faced demolition.
As President, the Obama administration gave $535 million to Solyndra, claiming that it would create 4,000 new jobs. However, instead of creating those 4,000 new jobs, the company went bankrupt. It was later revealed that the company’s shareholders and executives had made substantial donations to Obama’s campaign, that the company had spent a large sum of money on lobbying, and that Solyndra executives had had many meetings with White House officials.
More recently as President, Obama had the Obamacare website built by cronies instead of by qualified programmers. After the website went on line, CBS News quoted Luke Chung, an online database programmer who supports Obamacare, as saying the following about the Obamacare website: “It wasn’t designed well, it wasn’t implemented well, and it looks like nobody tested it… It’s not even close. It’s not even ready for beta testing for my book. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that.”
There is no real difference between any of these three things. The specific details differ, but the basic, fundamental principles of all three are the same.
Regarding the failure of the Obamacare website, Obama said:
“No one is more frustrated than I am.”
Obama has absolutely no right to be “frustrated” about any of the Obamacare webstie’s problems, because he is the person who chose to cause those problems in the first place.
It was Obama who signed a 2,600 page law that he hadn’t read.
It was Obama who added an additional 20,000 pages of regulations that he hadn’t read to Obamacare without Congressional approval.
It was Obama who chose to hire cronies instead of competent programmers to create the Obamacare website.
It was Obama who waited until after the 2012 election to issue some of the main rules for the Obamacare website, which gave the programmers less than one year to comply with those rules, instead of the three and half years they would have had if Obama hadn’t waited.
It was Obama who falsely said that the price of annual family insurance premiums would fall by $2,500.
It was Obama who falsely told people that they could keep their insurance if they were happy with it.
It was Obama who gave employers a huge financial incentive to switch their full time employees to a part time, 29 hour week.
It was Obama who refused to fire Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius after the Obamacare website failed.
Every thing that’s bad about the Obamacare website is the direct result of choices that Obama made.
Obama has no right to be “frustrated” at the website’s failure.
You want to know the people who really do have the right to be “frustrated” at Obamacare’s problems? It’s the people who have opposed Obamacare from the start. It’s the people who predicted that these problems would happen. It’s the people who called the bluff from the very start on Obama’s many lies about Obamacare. These are the people who have the right to be “frustrated” at Obamacare’s problems.
And yet somehow, not only does Obama falsely say that he is “frustrated,” but he also falsely says that he is more frustrated than anyone else.
The people who truly are “frustrated” are the millions of people who were against Obamacare but are now being forced to participate in it.
Obama owns this – he created it. He has no right to be “frustrated” about it.
Instead of practicing what she preaches in her “Let’s Move” program, Michelle Obama has decided to avoid picking her own vegetables from her own garden, and instead, to allow them to rot.
In the famous White House kitchen garden, tomatoes are rotting on the vine. Herbs have gone to seed. And the sweet potatoes – a favorite of President Barack Obama – have become worm food.
It’s another impact of the government shutdown, one that only the fox and the many squirrels that live on the White House grounds could love.
For the past five years, the media has told us about Michelle Obama’s garden. But now we see that it’s a fraud. It was never her garden. It is and always has been the government’s garden. And now that there’s a government shutdown, there are no government employees to pick the vegetables.
I guess Michelle Obama is too lazy to take her own advice from her “Let’s Move” program to “get moving” and pick her own vegetables.
This isn’t the first example of the government shutdown exposing how spoiled and lazy she is. After the government shutdown caused her 16 “assistants” (who are paid salaries as high as $172,200) to be laid off, her Twitter account said:
“Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, updates to this account will be limited.”
Wikipedia’s Obamacare article ignores almost every single criticism of Obamacare that has been reported on by the news, and of the few that it does mention, it severely understates the problem. Some of these criticisms did get added to the article, but they were deleted.
So, some crazy person suggested, on the article’s talk page, that a few specific criticisms be added to the article, such as the healthcare.gov website not working, the large number of employers who have switched to a 29 hour work week (the article mentions, but severely understates, this problem), Obama’s broken promise of letting people keep their insurance, Obamacare “rate shock,” the politicians and unions who supported Obamacare but requested and obtained waivers for themselves, and a few other things. And this person posted links to reliable sources for all of them.
Not only were these suggestions deleted from the talk page, but the user who posted these suggestions was banned.
As a result, wikipedia’s article on Obamacare is about the promises of Obamacare, instead of the actual real world results of Obamacare.
Of course this violates wikipedia’s policy of requiring articles to be true and accurate and unbiased, but hey, wikipedia is controlled by Obama supporters – all the conservatives and libertarians who who tried to balance out the various Obama articles with reliably sourced criticism have been banned from wikipedia for doing so.
I’m shocked – shocked – to see certain things in Phantom of the Opera that I did not see in other classic Universal monster films! For one thing, this movie has vermilion. It also has chartreuse and lavender. It has azure. It has ochre and magenta. It has aquamarine, maroon, and burnt umber. It has turquoise and saffron. Why, this movie even has crimson – even the Dracula movie didn’t have crimson! I tell you – seeing these things in this movie was totally unexpected. It defied my expectations of what I thought was a common characteristic of all of the films in this series. My preconceived notions and assumptions have been desecrated. I suppose that I will get over this eventually, but it will definitely take some time.
1) Carried out military interventionism in Libya without Congressional approval
In June 2011, U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said that Obama had violated the Constitution when he launched military operations in Libya without Congressional approval. (more…)
drudgereport.com is run by Matt Drudge, who runs the website in his pajamas from his apartment. I’ve visited his website just about every day since the late 20th century. It runs very well. His website has gotten as many as 45 million hits per day.
On the first day of the Obamacare website, it had 5 million visitors. It could not handle that amount of traffic.
IT experts who had analyzed the data going to and from the Obamacare website said the reason that people could not use it was because it was launching the equivalent of a “denial of service attack” against itself. They said the website was sending and receiving massive amounts of unnecessary data back and forth between itself and users’ computers. The IT experts attributed this to bad programming, and said that adding more servers would not fix the problem.
1) After Obamcare was passed, unions that supported its passage requested and received special exemptions
Within months after Obamacare was passed, Obama gave some organizations an exemption from some of the requirements of Obamacare. As time went on, more than 1,300 organizations received these exemptions.
More than half of the people who are covered by insurance plans that received these exemptions are in union insurance plans. These unions supported the passage of Obamacare. But immediately after Obamacare was passed, these unions wanted exemptions from the very same law that they wanted to force everyone else to obey. This reveals an extreme level of hypocrisy among many of the supporters of Obamacare.
In addition, these exemptions are illegal for two reasons – because Obama granted the exemptions without approval from Congress, and because the Constitution requires the law to treat everyone the same.
“Selective enforcement of the law is the first sign of tyranny. A government empowered to determine arbitrarily who may operate outside the rule of law invariably embraces favoritism as friends, allies and those with the best-funded lobbyists are rewarded. Favoritism inevitably leads to corruption, and corruption invites extortion. Ultimately, the rule of law ceases to exist in any recognizable form, and what is left is tyranny.”
“The now-familiar monthly trickling down of new waivers is, at best, a tacit admission that Obamacare is a failure. So far, seven entire states and 1,372 businesses, unions and other institutions have received waivers from the law. The list includes the administration’s friends and allies and, of course, those who have the best lobbyists.”
“More than 50 percent of the Obamacare waiver beneficiaries are union members, which is striking because union members account for less than 12 percent of the American work force. The same unions that provided more than $120 million to Democrats in the last two elections and, in many cases, openly campaigned in favor of the government takeover of your health care, now celebrate that Obamacare is not their problem.”
2) After Obamacare was passed, politicians who voted for it asked for a special exemption for their own districts
Even the politicians who voted for Obamacare want exemptions for their own districts.
In response to the medical device tax that is part of Obamacare, some medical device manufacturers have announced plans to layoff employees, including Welch Allyn (275 planned layoffs), Stryker (1,170 planned layoffs), and Medtronic (1,000 planned layoffs).
In December 2012, Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry, and 15 other Democrats who supported the passage of Obamacare wrote a letter to Harry Reid, asking him to delay the tax on medical devices, claiming that the tax would hurt job creation in their districts. (more…)
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 
