In his ObamaCare valedictory last week, President Obama championed the law’s successes: twenty million Americans have free or subsidized insurance; sick people cannot be denied coverage; thrifty policies with spending limits are gone. His timing was impeccable, as three days later the government announced that premiums increased nationwide by an average of 25% as insurers flee the exchanges. Yet, President Obama remains in denial about the root cause of this calamity. He insists that the “problems that may have arisen from the Affordable Care Act [are] not because government is too involved in the process.” Instead, he continues to blame rising premiums, shrinking networks, and reduced choice on everything else, except the Affordable Care Act itself.
In a brief moment of candor, former President Clinton called the ACA’s collapse “the craziest thing in the world,” and lamented that people who liked their insurance have found their “premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.” President Obama maintains a different explanation. “Insurers just set their prices too low at the outset,” he said, and when “they started losing money . . . now they’ve decided to significantly increase premiums.” This explanation sounds intuitive, but is extremely misleading.
Maybe someone should have spoken up and warned this might happen.
Oh… never mind.
In another speech, a few days ago, Obama pointed out the benefits of being poor:
You get your premiums paid for in full or in part by other, tax-paying, Americans.
Of course, he didn’t point out how high your deductibles would still be.
You could NEVER afford to use the insurance other people’s money paid for.
Hillary has weighed in with her solution: HIGHER penalties for not getting covered on one of the ObamaCare plans.
Make it SO high that people can no longer choose to take the penalty and pay cash at the doctor’s office.
From Attila the Hen(Hillary)we get CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK,CLUCK
@Nanny G: Yeah, their brilliant solution for the skyrocketing premiums? SUBSIDIES!! Taxpayer money.
Liberals never have a solution for a problem that does not involve spending taxpayer money. Rewarding bad behavior. Rewarding failure. Just as long as someone else pays the bills.
Bill. Liberals solutions always involve the goverment Liberals beleive Big Goverment solves everything why else do they support the demac-RATS
70% of all those on ACA will pay less than $100 per month for the midlevel “Silver” plan
OMG !!! those pitiful people who used to have no insurance and now must buy ACA. How will they survive?
The nonpartisan Kaiser Permanente group provided most of the citations for Politifact http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/25/donald-trump/trump-obamacare-health-care-premiums-going-35-45-5/
After getting so badly hosed on the “death panels” perhaps more critical analysis of primary sources would be in order.
@john: October 25, 2015
A bit outdated. Currently, Trump is correct. It must be a fact, since Obama has already started blaming everyone else, what he usually does when his lies come home to roost.
@Bill- Deplorable Me: He just read it in the news.
@john:
It’s called a subsidy. Taking money from one person and redistributing it to another by force. This is all Democrats know.
Any rational, functional legislative body that truly had the best interests of the people in mind would have been doing it’s best to address the problems Obamacare is encountering, not wasting time with efforts to return the entire discussion back to the same point is was stuck at for years.
Why does this happen? Here’s a revealing exchange that shows what those truly seeking the best interests of the people are up against.
@Greg:
You fool, you will never fix the unaffordable act with mandatory issue and community rating.
What part of the failed plan is redemptive? And the solution proposed by the leftists is to throw more money(by taking it from one group of people and giving it to another undeserving group) at an unfixable bureaucratic mess.
It is morally wrong to take the property of one who has earned it only to redistribute to one who has not. This is the core element of the leftists ideaology.
@July 4th American: Their answer is subsidies. Take taxpayer money and compensate for the devastation Obamacare has wrought upon the health care system. No effort to fix the problem (expecting healthy people to step up, spend their money for something they neither want nor need to pay for the freebies handed out), just raise taxes, spend money on yet another failed, expensive liberal social engineering experiment gone terribly wrong.
Gruber thinks the penalty needs to be higher, which is probably true but the Democrats avoided that so that the punitive character of this law would not be so obvious.
@Greg: #10
Good news Greg, the way we got it is going to be the way we get rid of it…..
Just as the situation was in 2008 in dire economic conditions, if the Republicans do the things necessary to restore the economy and some confidence in Government, they will expand their majorities in 2018. This should allow them to promote even more truly conservative ideas and implement more conservative policies which will benefit those left behind by liberals breeding dependency.
If not, we will see another overturn of authority, more gridlock, game-playing and obstruction.
No doubt, the Democrats will fight progress tooth and nail, just as Reid did after 2010. Hopefully we get can break through to growth.
Donald Trump is about to face a rude awakening over Obamacare
Rhetoric doesn’t make the problems go away. Obamacare is an effort to deal with them. If you repeal it, you had better have a real alternative that addresses the same problems ready to roll out. Republicans don’t. They could have focused on bettering Obamacare, but they weren’t interested in problem solving. They were only interested in playing politics.
The unaffordable care act needs to be repealed, it is not able to be modified to work. It was designed, admitted by Gruber to fail and force a single payer system. The best thing for Americans is to get rid of it.
@Greg:
More good news, Greg….
You evidently haven’t yet figured out yet that Donald Trump was saying whatever he needed to say to get elected. The clue was the fact that he switched positions more often than a weather vane, showed no concern whatsoever about contradicting in the evening what he had said earlier that morning, and didn’t take issue with the far right, because that only offended those who weren’t going to vote for him anyway. He quickly picked up on the fact that his target audience didn’t notice or didn’t care. The truth is that I don’t know what Trump will actually do, and neither do the people who voted for him.
I know the GOP thinks they can control him because they hold investigative powers, but they’re overlooking the fact that he’s far better at manipulating public opinion than they are. That’s how he got elected to begin with. I won’t write off the possibility that he could make up for lost support on the right by redefining himself in a way that would pull in people who previously voted against him.
@Greg:
@July 4th American: Liberals will never learn that a faulty ideology always results in unintended consequences.
@Greg: And Hillary was telling the truth! Ha Ha Ha
@July 4th American, #20:
You left out an interesting part of the article:
In other words, nothing would change until the next mid-term election has passed. Because many of those 22 million people who will lose their health insurance are voters, and have friends and family who are voters.
Did you happen miss the words universal healthcare? As pointed out in the article linked in post #16, it’s that universal part that gets you back to the requirement that coverage be mandated—otherwise the program can’t be paid for without premiums going up.
I can’t wait to see the shell game they roll out as their “cheaper” alternative. That, of course, will have to be after the next election. There is no free lunch.
Then we’ve got the costs of greatly expanding the military, building The Great Wall of Mexico, and rounding up and putting on the other side of it 12 million undocumented aliens. And the infrastructure! We’re going to fix that! All while giving everybody tax cuts—especially those at the very top of the food chain, who are expecting some very big ones. As a result, deficits will fall and the debt will be reined in.
I’ll believe it when it happens. What I’m expecting is another episode of greatly increased deficit spending. Because that’s what happens when you increase expenditures while cutting revenue.
@Greg: When you are wrong again, would you please irritate some liberal blog?
@Greg:
@john:
There is no hope for you John, Stupid can’t be fixed.
@Greg: 19
boo hoo hoo and of course, NO Dimocrat has ever done ANYTHING like that. The Dims are all truth telling straight shooters, as in ‘if you like your Doctor, you can keep your doctor’. Do you need a link to a new supply of crying towels, boo hoo hoo………..
@Greg:
Your theories were soundly defeated on Nov 8, now you going to have to learn to like how the civilized common sense people do things.
What you have bought is a bill of goods, none of which has been delivered. I would probably wait to see what’s inside the box.
@Greg: It’s certainly not crying towels, they were all delivered to the Dimocrats
@john, #6:
I forgot the horrors of the death panels, which were even more terrible that the confiscation of everyone’s guns. Then we’ve got the predicted $6 per gallon gasoline, the 8 percent unemployment rate, the Obama stock market crash, and the total destruction of our national economy. It’s astonishing that we have somehow managed to survive the last 8 years of democratic disaster.
Happily all of these things can now be reversed and remedied, and we’ll again have a President in the White House that will serve as an inspiration for all and a role model for the children.
@Greg: You are still buying what you paid for over the last 8 yes!
How soon will it be after January 20, 2017 when it is learned what the real unemployment number is, the real debt including unfunded liabilities, and the homeless. Where have they been the last 8 years?
What with the NY slimes confessing to bias reporting and their pledge to be honest, will we be told the truth about the last 8 years. I hardly think it likely as they, the praetorian guard continue to protect their savior o’bama….
@Greg:
You seem to want to argue that just because the left tried and FAILED to achieve these goals, they never intended to go there. The death panels exist, in precisely the form it was alleged; a panel of bureaucrats that will decide who gets what healthcare and, thus, who survives and who doesn’t. Likewise, the left uses every gun tragedy (most of which are linked right back to liberalism) to further their agenda end the 2nd Amendment. Laws of restriction, ban and confiscation sprang up in liberal enclaves all across the nation in 2012. Simply because you wanted to and failed does not mean you didn’t want to.
It is surprising we survived the most incompetent failure ever to enter the White House. Of course, the mess he leaves, but at home and abroad, remains.
We prevented the Supreme Court from becoming a liberal rubber-stamp. That saved the nation.
Sunday Talks: Chris Wallace -vs- Kellyanne Conway (repeal Obamacare Jan. 20th)
Sunday Talks: Chris Wallace -vs- Kellyanne Conway (repeal Obamacare Jan. 20th)
@Greg:
This just in: