Liberal Pundit Upset Over Losing Her Non-Lousy Insurance Plan...and then some

But first, more confirmation of what we linked to (four times) last week:

"The employer mandate, set for next year, may cancel existing plans for as many as 93 million Americans just in time for 2014 midterms [political elections]..."

"Affordable health care means trying to get more people insurance. ... Making people who had insurance buy a different product that costs more for less coverage? You can't ... defend that." ~ Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. (from that same article)

That's the Kirsten Powers who likes to call all Tea Party, hard-right, you know, conservatives, "Whacko Birds" and "Whiners", writing for the liberal Daily Beast (although she does have some remarkable observations and truth-telling in her latest column and one entitled "Give Back Your Peace Prize." She also rightfully asks (presumably of her side, because Catholic conservatives are already up in arms about this): "Where's the Outrage?" about Christians being slaughtered throughout the Middle East. (Hey, it's kinda what we do: allow ourselves to be persecuted for our faith. Heck, even liberal Bill Maher, the very one who complimented the 9/11 suicide attackers as "not cowardly" for staying with the planes as they flew them into the World Trade Towers, even he recently argued that true, modern-era Christians may get "pissed off" over being insulted or persecuted, but they're not going to resort to violence in retaliation.)

[And as for Powers' supporting Reza Aslan having written a book about Jesus as the "Zealot," here's an excellent review which debunks the Jesus debunker quite well..]

And more and more ObamaCare supporters are getting the shaft, as the uber-liberal LA Times keeps reporting:

"I had a feeling my cost would go up," said Davis, who makes just enough money to be ineligible for a government subsidy, "but I was floored when I saw that it was an 87.7% increase."

Old News Now, But Still True: PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter "PANTS ON FIRE" Rating of Obama's "If You Like Your Plan, You Can Keep Your Plan. PERIOD."

The liberal Washington Post's Four Pinocchios (worst) rating for same.

"'Yes, if you like your plan, you can keep it, unless you have great benefits,' Lindsay McLaughlin, legislative director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, told CBSNews.com.

"...the "Cadillac tax" is 'bringing more immediacy' to the issue, prompting employers to scale back plans they wouldn't otherwise, 'with the 2018 deadline looming.'

"'The clear expectation was and is that the "Cadillac tax" -- the tax on high-cost health plans -- will cause those [employers offering] highly generous plans to pare back benefits somewhat so that they won't be subject to the tax,' Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained to CBSNews.com.

"In 2018, the rule will impose a 40 percent excise tax on employee benefits exceeding $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families. In 2013, the average employer-sponsored for individuals cost $5,884 and the average family plan cost $16,351."

"Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that she will co-sponsor a bill by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) to require insurance companies to continue offering their existing health care plans — a way to make good on President Barack Obama’s promise that consumers can keep their current coverage if they like it."

Probably because The Washington Post just reported that "Troubled HealthCare.gov unlikely to work fully by end of November."

"Is Obamacare Driving Doctors to Refuse Insurance?"

"But many of those getting [cancellation] notices will find ...their new plan is likely to carry a higher premium and a bigger deductible and to cut them off from their current doctor.

"Does Obama really think that recipients of those notices — millions of them — won’t notice that? Even the mainstream media have featured dozens of interviews of people tossed off plans they like — only to be offered expensive, less attractive Obama-mandated alternatives.
...
"I’m not surprised that Obama tells untruths. He’s surely not the only politician to do so. I’m just surprised that he chooses to tell such obvious ones — ones that will inevitably be found out.

"Who will tell Obama that lies so transparent render rhetoric not just useless but ridiculous?"

The Cancer Survivor we linked to earlier last week is callously, coldly challenged by the White House Tweeter Brigade.

THIS is how they're trying to sell you on ObamaCare?? Like you're just a skirt with female parts and he's just a piece of meat to "get between the covers"?? Seriously? If this kind of ad appeals to you at all, how much more like animals can you get?

Wink-wink-nod-nod-thumbs-up-on-the-side to your birth control pills? Really?

"As I remember it, the Democrats on Capitol Hill got the bill they wanted. They were heady, back in the majority, with a new and popular president, and they didn’t much care about GOP support. They wanted the credit: It was their bill. They wrote it in a way no Republican could support. And they got no Republican support. When Paul Ryan, who had emerged as the Republican point man, attempted to come forward with ideas, he was rebuffed.
...
"The new [Democrat] talking point it that ObamaCare was damaged and fell due to Republican 'sabotage.' Republicans on Capitol Hill refused to vote for it, refused to like it and support it. They tried repeatedly to repeal it and defund it.

"And all this is true. But it is not sabotage. This is opposition.

The Republicans thought the ACA a bad piece of work, a bad bill that would make things worse, not better.
...
"The new president—and this was a key historic moment—decided not to act on the accumulated presidential wisdom of the ages, which is: Get the other party in on all big things. Give them a stake in it, use them for cover, show you have bipartisan juice, that you are truly national and not only the leader of one party, show you can wield your mighty power across the aisles. Get them bragging they passed it, with your leadership. Make them co-own it so that when certain parts don’t work, and certain parts won’t, they have deep motives to help you fix it.

"Instead, a perfect storm of misjudgment, immaturity and lack of historical perspective, and a perfect storm of shortsighted selfishness (it’s all ours, it’s not even a little bit yours) brought forth a perfect storm of a health-care disaster.

Fixes? Not really:

"Cancelled plans generally can't be reinstated. Tweaking the law’s grandfathering rules won’t work, because of the start dates of many of the plans and because insurers, who have spent months if not years preparing their systems for the changeover, can’t rapidly reorganize their computer systems to accommodate a sudden change in policy. Expanding subsidies to individuals above 400 percent of the poverty line in order to mitigate the cost of buying a new plan wouldn’t be legal, and also wouldn’t help much if the online enrollment systems are still malfunctioning."

The Washington Post, grasping at straws perhaps, floated one idea to let the insurance companies enroll people directly, but that leads to a whopping problem because it requires:

"Let[ting] the insurers estimate the subsidies on their own. Any estimates that are too low would be reimbursable, and any estimates that are too high, the insurers would get to keep. In other words, the federal government, backed by taxpayers, would be on the hook for their bad estimates.

"Can this possibly be legal? Can the administration seriously be considering this idea, which is potentially costly and politically disastrous? Imagine how Democrats will feel about turning over the central operations of the health law to insurers. Imagine how Republicans will react to a plan that could cost more, and will serve as an implicit admission that the exchanges simply won’t work without a major overhaul."

F.Y.I: MORE FAILURES from the OBAMA PRESIDENCY (and I'm not even listing the "Shovel-Readies-That-Weren't"):

1. "CASH FOR CLUNKERS: Most of the 677,842 sales were simply taken from the near future" and the estimate reported 13 days ago is that "the cost per job created by the program was $1.4 million." Read that last part again, and let it sink in.
2. "The secret, dirty cost of Obama's green power push"-- an Associated Press report on how growing too much corn for ethanol has environmentally destroyed 15 million acres of land.
3. "We went on a bond-buying spree [to ease credit for regular consumers in trouble] that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street." That link is to the confession of the man hired by the Federal Reserve to "quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history", which has failed miserably and on which the Fed still won't pull the plug:

   "The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE [Quantitative Easing] taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history...after a 14% drop in the U.S. stock market and renewed weakening in the banking sector—the Fed announced a new round of bond buying: QE2. Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, immediately called the decision 'clueless.' That was when I realized the Fed had lost any remaining ability to think independently from Wall Street. Demoralized, I returned to the private sector...I can only say: I'm sorry, America."

   Bernanke was first nominated to the Federal Reserve Chairmanship by George W. Bush, but the QE1, 2 and 3 bond-buying sprees which artificially propped-up the markets, fooling us into thinking we were experiencing a recovery, began almost immediately after Obama was elected to his first term, and continued after Obama renominated him. And it did us more harm than good:

   Of course the mere mention of ‘economic recovery’ perhaps does the most to explain why we never experienced a real one under Bernanke, and why we won’t enjoy one under Yellen insofar as Yellen’s meddling hand resembles Bernanke’s. We won’t because lost on both is the essential truth that the recession IS the recovery, it is the fix, it is the happy reversal of that which made us ill initially, including excessive consumption of housing. Recession is the market’s way of correcting the mistakes, the misallocations of capital, the labor market mismatches, and in a more literal sense, it’s the market’s way of releasing the human, physical and financial assets of Webvan and theglobe.com to nascent concepts that the markets actually want like Google and Facebook.

   In light of the above, it’s long fascinated this writer that so many who are so smart, and who should know better, ascribe ‘brainy’ to people like Bernanke. Really? If Bernanke were brainy he would understand that his unwillingness to cease ‘supporting’ the economy is the Green Monster of a barrier to the economic recovery we all crave. Yellen represents more of the same. Like Bernanke, her hunger for adulation will cause her to continue ‘helping’ the economy stay afloat, and in doing so, she’ll cruelly rob us of the recovery we so desperately desire.

   Don't believe that we haven't had a real recovery? Politifact.com did its homework:

   When Obama was elected in November 2008 and then took office in January 2009, the rates of unemployment and "broader unemployment" (see Politifact.com's site for explanation) were 5%/9.2% and 7.8%/14.2%, respectively. By 2012, both rates were still between 4 and 5 percent HIGHER than when he took office: to 8.2% and 14.8%. The "disposable personal income per capita" (after taxes, social security and medicare deductions, per person) when Obama took office was $32,166 per year. Three years later, in 2012, it had grown by just one-and-a-half-percent, only a measly $501, and was flat for the last two years, at $32,677. Meanwhile, the poverty rate increased a whopping fourteen percent from 13.2% in 2009 to 15.1% in 2011. Government spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) skyrocketed 21 percent, from 19% to almost 23%.

   Don't think those debt increases are so spectacular? When was the last time you got three, annual 7% raises in a row totalling 21% of your salary or hourly rate of pay? I'm betting a thousand dollars on NEVER.

   The federal government "recovered" nicely. The rest of us? Not so much.

   Politifact.com also noted that in 2009, when Obama took office, the total federal publicly-held debt he inherited was $6.37 Trillion. By the 5th month of 2012, Obama had almost doubled our nation's debt to just about $11 Trillion. Think of it as the credit card you can never get out from under because you keep maxing it out and getting ever-higher credit limits to spend beyond your means.

   So we owe now, November 2013, over $17,000,000,000,000.00. A 168% increase so far, all on Obama's timecard. And the national debt is now LARGER than our Gross Domestic Product (currently on that clock at just shy of $16 Trillion). That is not good.

   Why is that not good? The GDP is the value of all goods and services we workers in this U.S. economy produce in a year. In personal terms, it's not exactly like this, but to make a loose comparison of the seriousness of the problem: if you brought home $100,000 in salary, that's the value of your services to your employer. If you rack up debt higher than $100,000, sure, you could keep paying interest on that debt, maybe $20,000 a year if you're lucky, but you'll always be in the hole, owned by that debt, beholden to the credit holders. You'll never advance. You'll never truly thrive.

   From USA Today, January 2012:

   President Obama's 2012 budget shows the debt soaring past $26 trillion a decade from now. Last summer's deficit reduction deal could reduce that to $24 trillion...Among advanced economies, only Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Portugal have debts larger than their economies. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy are at the root of the European debt crisis. The first three needed bailouts from European central banks; Italy's books are monitored by the International Monetary Fund.

   By the time he's out of office, Obama will have more than TRIPLED our national debt. AND HE WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR QUADRUPLING OUR DEBT BY 2022. That's a 300% increase. Three. Hundred. Percent. Increase.

   
   
   Back to the here and now, since most people don't want to deal with our Future Land of The 12 Trailing Zeros, TIME's interview with that former QE "quarterback" is also helpful to boil down the questions this issue raises:

   TIME: "If the Fed decides tomorrow to begin to wind down this program, wouldn’t the effect be higher interest rates and lower asset values? How will this help the economy?"
   Huszar: "I agree with you. We could have some pain associated with Fed tapering. But each day that QE continues, that potential pain increases because we’re distorting markets even more. We need to get to a point where we can get the size and the role of the Fed and the size and role of Wall Street back to where they belong. We have a structurally unsound economy where the conditions for growth are diminishing. If you look at global competitiveness of the U.S. economy, five years ago we were first in the world, today we’re seventh. If you look at our education system, forty years ago we were first in the world in college graduation rates, and today we’re fourteenth. You have a real decay in the conditions for growth in this country. There’s a question as to how much the government should be trying to stimulate economic activity and how much the government should be laying the groundwork for that activity to happen on its own. I worked in the government for nine years, and I believe it has an important role to play, but I also believe that the overall perspective is now entirely off."

   
   

   "Jean Claude Trichet, former head of the European Central Bank, who together with Bernanke, created the easy money policies that many central bank advocates feel saved the day during the economic storm of 2008-2009...[said] 'If [central banks] do too much, then they are only paving the way for the other partners, the governments, the parliament and the private sector, not to do their own job. It's clear that the central bank cannot do everything…. They have their own responsibility but what counts now is really that the structural reforms are made in all major advanced economies, certainly Europe,' [speaking to] CNBC while defending Bernanke... Imagine that? Asking politicians to reform their spending policies? ...[I]t’s...likely that central banks finally realize, like the rest of us have, that there is no way one can work with Barack Obama. Imagine that: Obama's 'the problem.' Glad they figured that out. And in response, the bank has closed their doors to him. They should have done that last year."