Freedom Line Blog

Time’s Swampland blog quotes a health care industry expert to confirm the obvious: “Many people are going to find out that the second part of the promise – that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor – just wasn’t true,” says a former George H.W. Bush Medicare and Medicaid official.

Fundamentally, Obamacare is designed to increase access to health insurance. It does this by increasing its costs and then transferring the extra money to eligible people in the form of insurance subsidies and enlarged Medicaid programs. To compensate, insurance companies will narrow their doctor networks. In many cases this will result in people losing access to the doctor of their choice.

In other words, the logical outcome of President Barack Obama’s law is to show that his promise of keeping one’s doctor is a lie.

Though the Swampland writer says “It’s unclear why the President made the promise about keeping your doctor,” it is abundantly clear that without such a promise Obamacare could not have passed. People were told they could get a flashy new entitlement at no cost to themselves. Now, they are finding out how truly wrong that promise was.

Byron York has a potential sneak peak at some of the most devastating political ads in the upcoming 2014 election.

It’s a list of Democratic U.S. Senators parroting President Barack Obama’s promise that “if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.”

The list comes with names, dates and the exact phrasing from 27 current Democratic Senators, courtesy of Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Among those profiled, three are in tight reelection fights ahead of 2014: Mark Begich (Alaska), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana) and Kay Hagan (North Carolina).

If you live in one of these states, expect to see and hear the following statement as the campaign season heats up:

SEN. MARK BEGICH (D-Alaska): “If you got a doctor now, you got a medical professional you want, you get to keep that. If you have an insurance program or a health care policy you want of ideas, make sure you keep it. That you can keep who you want.” (Sen. Begich, Townhall Event, 7/27/09)

SEN. MARY LANDRIEU (D-La.): “If you like the insurance that you have, you’ll be able to keep it.” (MSNBC’s Hardball, 12/16/09)

SEN. KAY HAGAN (D-N.C.): ‘People who have insurance they’re happy with can keep it’ “We need to support the private insurance industry so that people who have insurance they’re happy with can keep it while also providing a backstop option for people without access to affordable coverage.” (“Republicans Vent As Other Compromise Plans Get Aired,” National Journal’s Congress Daily, 6/18/09)

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

If you’re thinking about using Healthcare.gov to shop for an Obamacare-approved insurance plan – wait.

The personal information you enter to create an account may be unprotected from hackers.

That is the startling reality uncovered in testimony given by one of Healthcare.gov’s top IT officials to House investigators. Apparently, a memo documenting several “open high findings” – including the website’s vulnerability to identity thieves – was kept away from the person responsible for green-lighting its launch.

As the plot thickens, Avik Roy asks several pertinent questions: “First: Did Tony Trenkle intentionally conceal this critical information about high security risks from Henry Chao, or was it an accident? Second: Would Chao have recommended that the exchange go forward if he had been aware of high findings? Third: Did Marilyn Tavenner—the head of CMS—know about these issues when she issued the final go-ahead authorization? Fourth: Now that this information is public, why is the Obama administration encouraging people to enter their sensitive personal data into the non-secure healthcare.gov website?” (Emphasis added)

Why indeed?

Could it be that there is such a rush to spike Healthcare.gov’s enrollment numbers that Obama administration officials are willing to overlook the potential risk to millions of Americans’ private information?

It brings a whole new ominous meaning to the warning buyer beware.

Fox News says Democrats in Congress gave the Obama White House an ultimatum today: Fix the Obamacare-caused insurance policy cancellations by Friday, or we’ll vote for Republican measures that do.

Ordinarily, I would welcome bipartisan fervor allied against the Obama administration, but the 48 hour deadline has me holding my applause. No good policy or law can result from a two-day cram session overseen by panic-stricken political appointees. We’re much more likely to see a hastily written executive order rather than a carefully targeted proposal.

Because of that, it’s very likely that whatever the Obama White House produces on Friday will – over time – cause more problems than it fixes.

As to the Republican proposals that seek to reinstate canceled insurance plans, I’m not sure that’s a sound strategy either. Republicans didn’t vote for Obamacare, so they have zero responsibility for helping President Barack Obama keep his fallacious promise to let people keep their insurance policies if they want to.

People are losing their insurance plans because Obamacare changes the insurance market. If Republicans want to keep pre-Obamacare insurance plans, they should insist on returning to a pre-Obamacare insurance market. Thus, as ever, the simplest Obamacare ‘fix’ is also the most effective: Complete repeal.

Anything else runs the risk of further distorting an already overregulated part of the health care sector.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Leave it to a former federal prosecutor to make the case for impeaching President Barack Obama over the latter’s massive fraud regarding the security of insurance policies after Obamacare.

“Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime,” writes Andrew McCarthy. “In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.”

As everyone knows by now, President Obama has lied repeatedly since at least 2010 that Americans who like their insurance will be able to keep it.

But just because Obama won’t be prosecuted doesn’t mean that his actions should go unpunished. As McCarthy reminds us, the standard for impeachment is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers as relating “chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

I agree with McCarthy that the billions of dollars lost by millions of health insurance consumers seems to qualify as a massive injury to society perpetuated by the man in the Oval Office.

Read the entire piece here.

Among other social-engineering priorities, Obamacare’s drafters decided that pricing insurance policies for men and women in relation to the services each group is likely to use is discrimination, since women, unlike men, need access to costly reproductive services.

The solution to this perceived problem is to mandate that all people purchasing insurance under Obamacare – including males covering only themselves – must pay for services like maternity care that they cannot use. The result is another HHS mandate that significantly raises the cost of health insurance on one group (men) for the sake of making it more affordable for another (women).

For a glimpse of where this comes from and where we’re heading, consider the Obama 2012 campaign’s much-maligned “Life of Julia” web video. It shows how a young girl in America progresses through adulthood without ever forming a family. Instead, her entire life requires a series of massive interventions from paternalistic government, including the likes of Head Start, public school, college loans, small business subsidies, child support services, as well as health and pension payments. The creators revel in the fact that all of these programs allow their heroine to live a life completely unimaginable absent such government-coerced public assistance.

My hunch is that many Republicans aren’t brave enough to denounce the Democrats’ “War on Men,” for fear of a feminist backlash. But if no protest is lodged, then the Party of Dependency will be encouraged to continue enacting policies that force traditionally conservative constituencies to pay for the lifestyle choices of consistently liberal voters.

Another day, another leaked attempt to make an end-run around Congress.

In the wake of the widespread insurance policy cancellations forcing individuals onto Obamacare exchanges, Obama administration officials are letting it be known that they are working on an “administrative fix” that would somehow provide financial relief for those affected that don’t qualify for federal subsidies to offset the health law’s higher premiums.

This trial balloon seems to be the necessary corollary to President Barack Obama’s promise Thursday night “to work hard to make sure that [people losing their individual policies] know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

Even if that means rewriting the law without Congress, and exploding the cost of Obamacare.

As written, Obamacare subsidies are capped at 400 percent of the federal poverty line, which translates into an annual income of no more than $46,000 per year for an individual.

But, “In June 2009, the CBO evaluated a draft proposal from the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee that offered subsidies as high as 500 percent of the federal poverty level,” writes Philip Klein.

“In the period from 2014 through 2019 alone, CBO estimated that the exchange subsidies would cost $1.2 trillion.” Dropping the cut-off level to 400 percent of FPL reduced the cost estimate to $458 billion over the same six year period.

If the Obama administration elects to go this route, Klein says expect to see another famous presidential pledge come under fire: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. I will sign if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”

Last night President Barack Obama issued a half-hearted apology for lying to millions of Americans.

“I am sorry that they [i.e. people who are losing their insurance plans due to Obamacare] are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News Thursday night. “We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

But even with the mea culpa, Obama couldn’t resist trying to minimize his culpability. His method was trying to make the amount of people affected seem like a rounding error.

“I mean, we’re talking about 5 percent of the population.” Of course, 5 percent of the American population is still 15 million people – enough to swing an election. More importantly, that number would be several times larger if Obama hadn’t already delayed the employer mandate.

A reasonable person in Obama’s shoes would now spend the next month or two in lock-down mode trying to fix his broken website and restore credibility to his administration’s ability to govern. But instead this president is going on the campaign trail to defend the indefensible to a skeptical public.

The president doesn’t seem to realize that achievement is what’s needed now, not tired empty rhetoric. If this keeps up, the odds look good for another Republican wave election in 2014.

In an interview with CFIF, Lawrence McQuillan, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, explains why ObamaCare will fail and free-market healthcare will succeed, and discusses the book “Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis,” which identifies the key problems with and corresponding solutions to ObamaCare.

Listen to the interview here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

It looks like the glitch-ridden federal health insurance portal Healthcare.gov isn’t the only Obama administration website in need of fixing.

A statement on WhiteHouse.gov still parrots President Barack Obama’s recently disavowed promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” reports Fox News.

On a page labeled “health reform details” the following statement appears: “For Americans with insurance coverage who like what they have, they can keep it. Nothing in this act or anywhere in the bill forces anyone to change the insurance they have, period.”

And yet President Obama said to his supporters on Monday, “What we said was, ‘You could keep if [your plan] if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed.’”

The about-face is due to the President of the United States being caught in a multi-year, bald-faced lie.

As I explain in my column this week, the Obama administration from the president on down has known since at least June 2010 that nearly 100 million Americans would lose their pre-Obamacare health care plans if the law was implemented as written. That’s one reason they delayed the employer mandate, and with it, the vast majority – almost 80 million – of projected policy cancellations. (Consumers in the individual insurance market are the ones being hit as the law intended.)

The conflicting statement on WhiteHouse.gov is just more confirmation that President Obama and his administration can’t be trusted to tell the truth.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

A meme circulating through the liberal punditry claims that the jaw-droppingly bad launch of Healthcare.gov, the federal Obamacare insurance website, is nothing to get all hot-and-bothered about. Remember the Bush administration’s poor rollout of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit? Its website was glitch prone at the start, but now the portal and the program are considered successful.

The same fate awaits Obamacare.

Or so supporters claim.

The analogy doesn’t hold though.

For starters, Part D was a far simpler program than Obamacare because it (1) added a new benefit to an existing federal scheme, and (2) could tap into existing relationships between Medicare and the intended beneficiaries. By contrast, Obamacare’s exchange model fundamentally changes how millions of individual Americans must buy health insurance; including those without any previous history of doing so.

Unlike liberal sympathizers who want to blur the distinctions in order to obscure Obamacare’s much more significant problems, thoughtful analysts like health expert Yuval Levin see the analogy pointing in a very different direction.

“The fact that even a much simpler federal undertaking ran into real problems should lead us to think that Obamacare could well encounter far, far worse and more difficult problems, on a scale that may not be readily addressable – as in fact seems now to be happening,” writes Levin. “It doesn’t suggest everything will be fine, it suggests the government hasn’t been good at even much easier tasks than the ones now set before it.”

Time will tell if the Obama administration’s “tech surge” fixes the glitches, but in the meantime it would be better if liberals stopped hiding behind false analogies, and admit that their big gamble to remake health care is dangerously close to an unprecedented failure.

Daniel Himebaugh, a friend and lawyer at Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), sends along an update about his firm’s ongoing challenge to Obamacare as violating the Origination Clause. Under the clause, all bills raising revenue via taxes must originate in the House of Representatives.

As Dan explains in a blog post, “We contend that the legislation that eventually became Obamacare failed to comply with the Origination Clause because it contains a tax on individuals that originated in the Senate. That’s where Majority Leader Harry Reid took a bill the House had already passed – HR 3590, which would have provided incentives for veterans to buy their first homes – and replaced all its contents with what became the ‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.’”

Importantly, none of the Supreme Court’s existing exceptions to the Origination Clause apply to the circumstances of Obamacare. Thus, striking down the entire law could be as straightforward as finding that the Senate failed to follow the constitutional process for passing a revenue bill.

PLF’s case, Sissel v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, is beginning its appellate journey in the D.C. Circuit, with an opinion anticipated early next year. CFIF readers and all lovers of liberty would do well to acquaint themselves with the details of the lawsuit, which the firm makes easy with links to a case page, an in-depth backgrounder and its opening brief.

Like the other legal challenges to Obamacare working their way through the court system, PLF’s case deserves not only a hearing, but a favorable result.

Since President Obama was—prior to its implosion—so hung-ho about comparing healthcare.gov to cutting edge private sector companies like Apple, Amazon, and Kayak, he certainly can’t mind the kind of data scrutiny that such companies thrive on. Try this one on for size: According to the Los Angeles Times:

Just six enrollments occurred on the opening day for www.healthcare.gov, the troubled Obamacare website, according to documents released late Thursday by a House oversight committee.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, obtained the tally from meeting notes compiled by officials inside the “war room” at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which was overseeing the rollout of the insurance marketplace.

If Apple had first-day numbers like that, someone (actually, many someones) would be fired. Mr. President?

Though Obamacare’s individual mandate barely survived the Supreme Court last year, there’s no guarantee that some of the law’s other elements will be so lucky.

Last week, Tim explained that litigation challenging the health law’s federal subsidy structure is proceeding toward the Court. If the Court’s four consistent conservatives and swinger Anthony Kennedy stay true to the text, citizens in 34 states won’t be eligible for subsidies that make Obamacare-approved insurance plans (somewhat) more affordable.

Another series of cases challenge the controversial ‘HHS mandate’ that requires all non-houses of worship to provide employees with access to contraceptives and abortion-related services; despite the objecting employer’s religious beliefs. Appellate level decisions are split between the government and private business, meaning the Court is very likely to decide the issue as a way to provide continuity throughout the nation.

If recent trends hold, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in both lines of litigation sometime next spring, releasing a high-profile opinion in mid-summer.

As long as Obamacare is the law of the land, there will be no end to the headaches it creates.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

We’ve spent virtually the entire month of October hearing about the practical defects of Obamacare—everything from the failures of the exchange website to the widespread cancellation of insurance plans that don’t comply with the health mandates. Apart from those functional considerations, however, there’s another major drawback to the law: it places America’s health care providers into a Faustian bargain with Washington.

Recall that in order to get many health insurance companies onboard to support Obamacare, the White House made what was essentially a quid pro quo deal: in order to cover the increased costs of covering the chronically ill that the plan would bring into the system, the individual mandate would ensure that young, healthy, actuarially sound Americans would be swept into the system too (the failure of the exchanges, however, is already steering this arrangement towards being upside down financially).

One of the downsides, however, of putting the industry at the government’s mercy is that the feds hold the whip hand when they fail to follow the party line. From CNN:

White House officials have pressured insurance industry executives to keep quiet amid mounting criticism over Obamacare’s rollout, insurance industry sources told CNN.

After insurance officials publicly criticized the implementation, White House staffers contacted insurers to express their displeasure, industry insiders said.

Multiple sources declined to speak publicly about the push back because they fear retribution.

But Bob Laszewski, who heads a consulting firm for big insurance companies, did talk on the record.

“The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet,” he said.

Laszewski, who’s been a vocal critic of Obamacare, said he’s been asked by insurance executives to speak out because they feel defenseless against an administration that is regulating their business — and a big customer.

Government-backed plans accounted for about half of health care policies last year, a number that is expected to grow over the years.

He who has the gold makes the rules, as the saying goes. It turns out there was an additional cost to Obamacare that the insurance companies didn’t factor in: their autonomy.