"To take away a man’s freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.” Madeleine L’Engle
October 30, 2013
By: Linda Case Gibbons
It’s not about the crummy website.
Or the dangers we face from identity theft on the crummy website.
Or the money that will be forcibly siphoned from us and redistributed.
It’s not even about Kathleen Sebelius.
After all, what has she done since she’s been in the Department of Health and Human Services that surprised you? You knew what she would do before she even got started.
She’s Hillary Clinton all over again.
Sebelius claimed it would be "illegal” for her to opt out of her federal plan and get insurance through the Obamacare exchanges. It’s not.
It isn't surprising she doesn’t know the law. What is surprising is that CNN pointed out that she was wrong.
CNN.
During Sebelius' Congressional testimony, Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) asked her why she hasn’t subjected herself to the experience he went through.
He rejected federal employer-sponsored coverage, enrolled in a plan in the individual market and then was informed he is losing that coverage because of Obamacare.
"Why aren’t you losing your health insurance?” he asked. "Why aren’t you in the exchange? You’re in charge of this law.”
She said she liked what she had.
No, it’s not about any of that, although it could be. It is about concealment and lies, a phrase Bob Woodward used this week to describe Obama and his administration.
Up until now, all of Obama’s scandals have been heartbreaking, confusing, infuriating, and shocking, but the public accepted that nothing was ever done about any of them.
A dark web of ineptitude, concealment and lies settled down over each scandal, but the public accepted that.
Obamacare, however, is a whole different can of worms. Here the whole Obama cast of characters has been thrust forward and shown in all their flawed glory. The light was turned directly on them and like so many cockroaches, they were sent skittering for cover.
For the first time everyone is sitting up and taking notice of the president’s inadequacy and duplicity in this his newest scandal.
Even CNN.
Why? Because Obamacare is hitting people in the pocketbook. Even Democrats. Even the folks at CNN.
The implementation of the law that was pushed through against the will of the people, its impact hidden from the public until after the 2012 election, has shown that we have a president who has no qualms when it comes to the truth.
He has decided you can’t handle the truth so he’s never going to bother telling it to you.
This week an obscure report surfaced, unearthed from the June 2010 edition of the Federal Register. It wasn’t pretty. It predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market and it was administration officials who were doing the predicting in the report.
In 2010.
So our fav, Press Secretary Jay Carney did his level best to deflect from the unsettling report.
The disruption, he said, only affected those who buy insurance on their own.
The disruption, he said, only affected five percent of the population. That would be 15 million.
It doesn’t. The real number is 93 million.
The report told us something we suspected all along. The president always knew you wouldn’t be able to keep your doctor, your health plan and it looks like a healthy chunk of your income.
He always knew deductibles would go up, premiums would go up, and so would the cancellation of policies.
And he knew it in 2010.
His press playfully awarded this rapscallion of a president four Pinocchios. Isn’t that funny? Someone countered with "it should be forty or fifty Pinocchios,” but no one mentioned impeachment.
Impeachment isn’t funny.
And it’s not funny when you’re one of the "Five Percent.” You’re not laughing when you open that letter from your insurance provider and learn you’re getting the heave ho.
Or when your premiums have tripled;
Or if you don’t have kids and you find out you’ll have to have to pay pediatric dental coverage for cleaning someone else’s kid’s teeth;
Or if you and your wife are in your fifties and your premiums go up because maternity care has to be included in your policy.
This all sounds unfair, but the president had a good reason for "protecting” you.
If he had told you the real score, he and his Democratic pals knew you’d never buy into it. They tried health care reform before and failed because Americans were happy with the coverage they had.
So Obama had no choice but to lie. And now "You can keep it,” has become "Those bad apple insurance companies are to blame,” and, "Sure, the Obamacare plan is more costly, but that’s because your old plan was so lousy,” and "If you lose your current plan, shop around. That's what the exchanges are for.”
When he first lied to you in 2010, you ignored a lot because you thought, "I can handle this because he says my plan is gonna’ be ‘grandfathered in.’”
That sounded nice because that is a real provision. If you had a plan you liked, if it fitted your needs, well, then, nothing would change for you.
Except the law. He changed that.
It was rewritten, altered to narrow the grandfathering provision, so that if the plan you had changed in any way, something as simple as a five dollar increase in your co-payment, it would no longer conform to Obamacare mandated guidelines, and you and your "grandfather” were out in the cold.
This didn’t just affect people who bought insurance on their own, Jay.
Nope. Under Obamacare, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their "grandfather status” and become illegal. That is half of the 156 million people reported to be covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.
Another 25 million have "nongroup and other” forms of insurance. Projections by the Congressional Budget Office estimate "40 to 67 percent” of these plans would lose their "grandfather status.”
So it made sense when Bob Woodward commented on Obama and his stint in the White House on Sunday’s Face the Nation.
"You run into this rat’s nest of concealment and lies time and time again then and now. You get to a point where it’s, ‘what do you worry about?’ Secret governments.”
Bob Woodward knows of which he speaks. He had to deal with another frightening president. Richard Nixon.
In all of this, one thing Obama and his team of underperforming ideologues have forgotten about. It's the same thing King George III forgot. His "subjects,” his "percentages” are real people.
It is individuals who open that letter from their insurance provider. It is individuals who learn they are losing the healthcare they chose. But most importantly, it is individuals who are having their freedom of choice snatched from them, a freedom they fought to have long years ago.
What we are seeing in this whole scenario is a type of arrogance that led a "select” group of people to feel honored to be "allowed” to invest with Bernie Madoff.
It is that same type of arrogance that led a group of people to vote for the first black president because they wanted the first black president, regardless of the content of his character.
They would argue to the death for his inadequacies.
They would cover for him and make excuses.
But now those same people are getting hit in the pocketbook and they don’t like the way it feels. So now they are checking out his credentials.
But don't feel bad. If you think Obamacare’s not for you, you’re not alone. And if you think this president has gone too far, ditto.
A North Carolina think tank has a website devoted to stories from people who are worse off under Obamacare. Here are a few.
"Currently our premium is $300.43 and will rise to $767.68 next year. On top of the huge premium increase, our deductible will be $5,500 per person and $11,000 for the family (there are two of us.)”
"I purchased a Blue Advantage Bronze 5500 insurance plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield NC for $94.00 per month. I received a letter on Sept. 24 stating that beginning Jan. 1 my new premium would be $651.48. Affordable Health Care??? Are you kidding me?”
These stories say all that needs to be said about a duplicitous president who is detached from any concern about our country and its people.
Affordable care? Give me a break.
Check it out at "I Couldn’t Keep My Plan” website from the Civitas Institute.
Hold the line, America.