To Obama: "You Can't Get the Genie Back In The Bottle"
A THIRD Lie, After The First and the Second Ones?
Obama did another press conference today, and uttered a repeat whopper:"And -- and so what we want to do is to be able to say to these folks, you know what, the Affordable Care Act is not going to be the reason why insurers have to cancel your plan."
Oh, but it already is, and forever will be, the reason, even as he is forced today to now backtrack to "allow" people to "re-up" to those now-cancelled plans but--- only IF the insurers re-offer those plans, and--- ONLY then, for one year. And there's no guarantee their costs to re-up won't skyrocket right now!
Gee, thanks, Obama.
You've really made a huge, disgusting mess of millions of people's lives--even the liberal Daily Kos opined, "We are in 'Read my lips, no new taxes' territory"--and now all you can say is "I'm sorry" and "MAYBE you can have the plan back that I promised 24 times you could keep, but it'll cost you beaucoup bucks more," not to mention the sleepless nights, gray hairs and ulcers you've added to the daily lives of 5 million plus Americans?
And it's only going to get worse, again, next year (when individuals again will lose the plans they like if they got them back, and businesses also are forced by ObamaCare to change/jack-up the costs of their plans), and the year after that (or so, when the Cadillac tax on the better-providing plans kicks in).
He actually thinks anyone (outside of the West Wing, Wasserman, Reid/Pelosi, Salon.com, Huffington Post, Chris Matthews and Juan Williams) is BUYING any of this?
Anyone who doesn't have their heads in the sand knows the obvious: insurers were forced to drop their private plans because ObamaCare decreed they were "substandard" and had to go or be replaced with the higher-cost, higher-deductible, lose-your-doctor, "gold standard" required by ObamaCare!
As Don Henley once sang, "You Can't Get the Genie Back In The Bottle." People, once they know they've been duped and screwed, aren't going to forget those facts, and they're not going to blame it on the insurers like Obama hopes.
Does Obama really believe that any American with half a brain is buying this bold-faced, rehashed statement? Everyone knows the insurers wouldn't have had to do what they're doing if ObamaCare didn't force them to change!
The lyrics of that Henley song are amazingly apropos:
"The Genie"
Is this what you wanted?
Did you even think twice?
Didn't they tell you that anything that feels this good
Comes with a price
It gave you such a rush
Now you think you've had enough
It's not that easy to walk away
This is the hard stuffYou can't get the genie back in the bottle
You can't get the genie back in the bottle
You can't get the genie back in the bottle
You can't get the genie back in the bottleAnd everything matters, everything matters
Everything you say, everything you doAnd the past comes back to smack you around
For all the things you thought you got for free
For the arrogance to think that you could somehow
Defy the laws of gravity
These are lessons in humility
Penitence for past offenses
Consequences, consequencesYou can't get the genie back in the bottle
You can't get the genie back in the bottle
You can't get the genie back in the bottle
Ironic, isn't it, that on the campaign trail against Romney, Obama said, "One of the things that you learn as President is that what you say matters and your principles matter."
Guess that he meant that only applies to other Presidents.
Note in that video clip how Obama then goes on to trash those "bad-apple" insurers who, he contends, just out-of-the-blue, "may come back and say, we want to charge you 20 percent more than we did last year, or we're not going to cover prescription drugs now." Obama blames it on "the nature of the market that existed earlier," instead of on the fact that they've been incurring massive costs in ramping up to comply with this beast. With his "new fix", he gets to shift the blame wrongly to the insurance companies, saying, "They would have dropped your plans you like and charged you sooooo much more ANYWAY, even without ObamaCare, or, if they do it now, then it's THEIR fault, not ours."
Balderdash. Once again, he thinks he can get the genie back in the bottle.
It's an amazingly weak defense, and one he tried in early October which didn't work then. First of all, because they rammed the bill through before anyone had a chance to "find out what's in it", without a single Republican vote, we'll never know if the insurers would have jacked up people's private insurance rates and deductibles 100% or 200% anyway, like ObamaCare is forcing them to do now.
Secondly, the insurers have been paying internal costs, for three years, to change systems, procedures, everything, to accommodate these "mandated" (don't forget that word) changes to individual and to all plans. That costs money. Did anyone think they'd just eat those costs themselves? Does anyone think ANY business stays in business eating such costs forever or 100%? If so, you haven't a clue what business means.
Remember, this is the ObamaCare individual mandate. Individuals, it is ObamaCare A.L.O.N.E. that made it mandatory by law that you get a plan that Obama has deemed acceptable. ObamaCare, then, defined your current plans (the ones you may have liked but have now lost) out of existence.
The BUSINESS mandate, which was miraculously extended from this year to 2014, will do the exact. same. thing to the plans the rest of us currently get from our employers, in almost all cases (possibly those large firms who self-insure will not be affected):
"If a captain has the lifejackets filled with cement, his assurance that “you can keep your lifejacket” is only half the crime. Obama knew the lifejackets wouldn’t work. In 2010 he admitted that 8 to 9 million people in the individual market might “have to change their coverage” because of the law. And that’s just the individual market. Millions more will eventually lose the insurance they like because of Obamacare, according to the administration’s own internal estimates.I don't want people to go without health insurance either, but allowing them to get competitive insurances ACROSS STATE LINES would have solved all the "bad-apple" insurance plans the Democrats say ObamaCare was designed to eliminate."The cancellations aren’t a bug, they’re a feature, and the president lied about it over and over again."
[More on that below]
When a product is brought to market and the market discovers — as it eventually has to — that the advertising wasn’t merely a tissue of lies but a geological stratum of lies, the utterly fair and justified response from the critics is “I told you so!” — not “Let’s make this thing bipartisan now.” That’s particularly true when the president continues to lie... If Obamacare had been a shining success from Day One, do you think the Democrats would be in the mood to share the credit? Then why should Republicans be in more of a mood to share the blame?You and I and we all know that, if the shoe was on the other foot, the Democrats would let the Republican President and his ilk twist in the wind, watching with chortled glee and arms folded across their chests. I don't want to see any Republican doing the chortling, but neither are we obligated to help make a bad, destructive reform stick.
The only question now, for elected Democrats or liberal pundits with rabid media audiences they must keep in profound ignorance, is this: Do you go down with the sinking ship, or do you bail and try to work with those (e.g. Paul Ryan) who tried to work with you first toward a real, workable, successful healthcare reform plan in the first place, but who you all sniffed down your noses at and ignored?
It comes down to what's more important, ALL the American people, or your pride?
Did Harry Reid say they'd repeal ObamaCare "over my dead body", or did he just imply it? I understand he probably believes he's doing the best thing for Americans, but I'd bet there are close to 5 million right now who would vehemently disagree with him. And soon enough there will be 93 million of those. Or more.
Short-term? I'm for the Democrat Landrieu bill, and so are six prominent Senate Dems. It comes closest, as far as I can surmise, in requiring insurers to allow people to roll back the clock and keep what they had, without continuing to sell whatever were bad plans to new customers.
I don't like the Republican Upton's bill--it has no teeth and thus no value to the people losing their plans. The results of Upton's bill would be the path of least resistance for insurers: to keep doing what they're doing, having already planned to comply with ObamaCare for the past three years, cancelling the existing "now-substandard" plans they've been cancelling.
Long-term? Once ObamaCare implodes, as it's looking likely to do? There are some plans that have long ago been proposed, it's just that the mainstream media which too many people rely on won't tell you about them:
- James Capretta and Robert Moffit's plan, original and updated version.
- Solving the Pre-Existing Conditions Issue (Yes, it can be done--and done better-- without ObamaCare)
- "Interstate insurance will work, but the market will evolve gradually..." in which it has been
"projected that a national insurance market would increase health coverage by 49 percent in New Jersey and 22 percent in New York. 'We find evidence of a significant opportunity to reduce the number of uninsured under a proposal to allow the purchase of insurance across state lines. The best scenario to reduce the uninsured, numerically, is competition among all 50 states with one clear winner. The most pragmatic scenario, with a good impact, is one winner in each regional market.'"
"The main barrier to establishing the sale of health insurance across state lines is the lobbying of each state’s insurance commissioner...These state insurance commissioners fight against this popular health care reform for one reason: power. Right now, they have it. When the sale of health insurance is restricted to just inside their state, they have the power to set and enforce the rules however they would like. In fact, that’s their primary response to the reform proposal: You can’t trust those other insurance commissioners, they’ll set worse rules than me, overly lenient ones! You don’t know anything about insurance, especially not health insurance; it’s much too complicated. Don’t worry about it though, I’ll protect you. As long as I set the rules for insurance in our state, I’ll make sure the insurance companies cover everything you need. Promise!
Tell them to just step aside. They're standing in the way of people benefiting.Realistically, it’s a power struggle. Insurance commissioners, like all bureaucrats, need to wield power in order to justify their position. Losing their total control over regulating the health insurance offered in their state means a loss of power. And like any other bureaucrat, they’ll fight that to their last breath.
Part two of the last link is here:
"Increasing market competition by allowing Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines will lead to lower costs, greater choice, and better quality of care
. Representative Paul Broun’s (R-GA) Patient OPTION Act is just one of several conservative bills that will allow Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines." - The Republican Study Committee's (RSC) plan
"would, obviously, repeal ObamaCare and associated tax hikes and replace it with market-based, patient-centered reforms that lower health insurance costs expanding access to health savings accounts (HSA) and by removing barriers that discourage competition."
- The Media's "Republicans Have No Obamacare Replacement" Myth....
Congressional Republicans know what they want to do...This is a picture of broad agreement throughout the [Republican] caucus on numerous health policy issues – the only real disagreements are about how to achieve these goals, not what the goals are. But what’s notable about this approach is that unlike PPACA [aka ObamaCare], you don’t need the Rube Goldberg-like assemblage of a 2,700 page bill to do it. You can do this in fifty pages, as Rep. Paul Broun does (he also reforms EMTALA, too!), or you could break them up and pass them separately. You don’t have a situation where pulling one block out makes the rest collapse, as we’re seeing even now in the arguments over states passing on the Medicaid expansion. Journalists who say this more gradualist approach to reform means there is no plan betray their ignorance or their bias or both.
- In fact, we might still have too many (this was written 16 months ago, not sure if these bills are all still around):
posted by Annie at 1:10 PM
