Healthcare.gov and Government Shutdown's Surprising Post-Mortems

From The Daily Beast: "Who in their right mind is going to feel comfortable giving income and other personal information to a site that inspires less sense of security than a Russian mail-order bride website? The government’s super-spy outfit—the National Security Agency—allowed a short-term contract employee to walk out with a bazillion incriminating PowerPoint slides. And you’re asking us to believe that HHS is going to keep things confidential?

...Healthcare.gov is a colossal, expensive failure that projects a 1970s-era DMV experience into cyberspace."

The Affordable Care Act [aka ObamaCare, see Jimmy Kimmel video] was passed in a dubious manner. The 60-vote level in the Senate was obtained by the subornation of Arlen Specter in that tainted window between his rejection by his own party and his defeat by the Pennsylvania voters, and by Al Franken’s questionable win in the Senate election in Minnesota, where partisan, county-by-county recounts overturned the people’s choice. Also, most egregiously, Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska had been narrowly defeated in 2008 after being convicted of taking a bribe — a conviction that was subsequently thrown out because of the prosecutor’s completely improper suppression of exculpatory evidence. (At least this was not a partisan act, as this was one of the more flamboyant initiatives of the George W. Bush Justice Department.)

The Affordable Care Act, then, owes its existence to political treachery, electoral hijinks, and extreme prosecutorial misconduct, and it ill behooves the Democrats and their incessant hallelujah chorus among both the hacks and the incurably gullible in the media to incant with woeful faces and in mournful inflection any misuse of due legislative process. The fact that the chief justice had to transform himself into an acrobat and claim that Obamacare was constitutional, under the federal government’s right to tax, does not excuse everybody else from seeing this ill-conceived monstrosity of a law for what it is and what its provenance is.

...The country is broke, paying its bills through a fraudulent sale of bonds to itself, running a $700 billion annual current-account deficit, and its leaders are in brinkmanship talks over the imposition of a law that no sane person now supports and that is impossible to obey.

This is the governmental equivalent of congestive heart failure.

Which makes your life miserable for many years before it kills you eventually, by the way. No one has ever been "cured" of CHF.

And all the "good stuff" people like, as mentioned in that Kimmel video, about not excluding pre-existing conditions, etc? Guess who's paying for all that? You and me and anyone who (is forced to ) go(es) on the exchanges for healthcare insurance:

Avik Roy, a writer at Forbes.com and an analyst at the Manhattan Institute who has been sharply critical of the president’s plan, calculates that coverage under Obamacare will on average be 99 percent higher for men and 62 percent for women than under currently available plans. That’s because Obamacare does away with exclusions for pre-existing conditions, severely caps premiums for older people, mandates coverage of a wider number of services, and more. You can argue whether those are good or bad things, but it’s hard to argue that they don’t increase costs that will ultimately be borne either directly by the insured or indirectly by taxpayes who will subsidize coverage. Roy contends that the “political objective [of] masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plan…far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly.”

On the post-mortem of the government shutdown, here are two articles by Democrat-biased pundits, both of whom outline their analyses that:

"If this is Republican surrender, I hope I never see Republican victory."

Note the blame-Republicans-for-everything slant that follows and take it with a shaker of salt:

To understand how upside down the current media analysis is, you need to go back a couple of years. In 2011, with Republicans threatening to provoke a debt default, President Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011, which cut government spending by $917 billion over 10 years. The agreement also created a congressional “supercommittee” charged with finding additional cuts. If the committee failed to do so, cuts totaling $1.2 trillion over ten years would kick in automatically at the end of 2012, via a process called “sequestration.”

What, Obama couldn't control his own budget without being forced to? He hasn't passed a budget to manage the government since 2009, and people don't see anything wrong with that?

How could YOU run your life without knowing what you had to spend and managing that to match what you had coming in? Do YOU get to tell your credit card company, "Oh, I vote to just raise my credit limit (debt ceiling) twice a year so I'll have more money to spend all I want. I don't care where you get the money from, just give it to me. You owe it to me. And I don't intend to pay it back, either. It'll just rack up to infinity, and your and other people's grandchildren can pay it back for me."

Traditionally in Washington, budget compromises had meant Democrats agreeing to cut domestic spending and Republicans agreeing to raise taxes. But by raising the specter of default, Republicans had changed the equation. In the Budget Control Act, taxes weren’t raised a dime. Democrats compromised by cutting spending and Republicans “compromised” by agreeing not to let America default on its debt and provoke a global financial crisis.

And if you did your homework like less than half of us have done, you'd know that it's all big talk: the government by law, is not allowed to default, and only if the President overrode that (not Congress) would the government not pay what it owed on its debt interest, thus resulting in default.

Not surprisingly, conservatives liked the deal more than liberals. In the House, Republicans backed it by a margin of almost three to one while Democrats split evenly. “Is this the deal I would have preferred? No,” Obama admitted. By contrast, House Speaker John Boehner boasted, “I got 98 percent of what I wanted.”

Fast forward to the beginning of this year. Despite months of negotiations, the supercommittee failed to reach an agreement, and so this March, automatic sequester cuts kicked in. (In between, Congress did raise some revenue by not extending the Bush tax cuts for individuals making over $400,000 a year). If Democrats disliked the 2011 Budget Control Act, they disliked its bastard stepchild, the sequester, even more...

...as recently as last month, GOP leaders described locking in the sequester cuts—via a “clean” continuing resolution (CR) that extended them into 2014—as a major victory. In a memo to fellow Republicans on September 6, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor boasted that by “signing a CR at sequester levels, the President would be endorsing a level of spending that wipes away all the increases he and Congressional Democrats made while they were in charge and returns us to a pre-2008 level of discretionary spending.”

For their part, Democrats bristled at the prospect of a “clean” CR. Four days after Cantor’s memo, the Democratic-aligned Center for American Progress warned that by extending the sequester, Republicans were “trying to lock these additional spending cuts into place and create a new baseline from which future negotiations must begin.” CAP added that “It’s easy to see why this approach would be attractive to Speaker Boehner; it is much harder to understand why any progressive or centrist would support such an approach.”

Let’s pause for a moment to underscore the point. In early September, a “clean” CR—including sequester cuts—that funded the government into 2014 was considered a Republican victory by both the Republican House Majority Leader and Washington’s most prominent Democratic think tank. Now, just over a month later, the media is describing the exact same deal as Republican “surrender.”

And from the uber-liberal Washington Post:

The shutdown deal includes a new bicameral budget commission that's supposed to figure out a replacement for sequestration [...the across-the-board spending cuts that came about from the 2011 debt-ceiling debate...] before the 2014 cuts kick in on Jan. 15. This will be the eighth major budget commission since 2010. Until now, every single one of them has failed for the same reason: taxes. And if nothing changes, this one will fail too.

But something should change: Democrats should admit the obvious. For the time being, they’ve lost on taxes. And you know what? That’s okay. At least, it could be, if they were willing to admit it and smartly negotiate the terms of their surrender.

...But [the current shutdown resolution deal] does one thing Republicans love: It locks in $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction without a dime in new tax revenue.

So maybe Boehner & Company aren't such "losers" after all.

Ask yourselves, why you even WANT a government to tax (remember, ObamaCare was deemed another "tax") us all to ruin, refusing to rein in its profligate overspending when it clearly can, and when it should, in order to avoid bankrupting the nation?

And the mainstream media is stupider than even I thought it was.