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Jon Stewart Grills Kathleen Sebelius On Obamacare Issues, Makes Strong Case For Single-Payer
Video in link
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...tml?ref=topbar
Dems lost the vote, they conceded. THEY DID NOT SHUTDOWN THE DUBYA GOVT NOR THREATEN TO DEFAULT THE USA
Jon Stewart Grills Kathleen Sebelius On Obamacare Issues, Makes Strong Case For Single-Payer
Video in link
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...tml?ref=topbar
The exchange is the location where private firms can go to post competing prices for health insurance right? Is that what part of Obamacare Darrin is looking for proof it is failing?
Do you really not see the difference of what happened then with what is happening now? Honest question.
You seem to know, so go ahead.
The vote was completely inconsequential and had absolutely no chance of negatively affecting the economy, shutting down govt, etc. it was nothing more than a symbolic gesture. That's nothing like what's going on now, which is why the tea bags are being called extremist. Sorry you don't like your fringe heroes being called names, but that's what they are...
Oh, it was just a symbolic vote. I get it. Thanks.
Health Exchange Tech Problems Point To A Thornier Issue
The primary contractor behind the federal health exchange software is a global firm called CGI Federal, which didn't want to comment for this story. Johnson says it's not that CGI or other contractors behind healthcare.gov are bad. They're probably just not the best, because the best people at these tech solutions don't bother applying.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcons...issue?sc=17&f=
No problem. Put a little thought into it next time instead of letting your emotions drive your responses and you may be able to come up with the answers yourself.
Last edited by Th'Pusher; 10-08-2013 at 08:50 PM.
They're the best at lobbying.
California exchange processes 16,000 applications
Officials with California's health insurance exchange said Tuesday that more than 16,300 applications were processed during the marketplace's first five days of operation, but they did not say how many people actually purchased coverage for 2014.
Covered California officials released the figure in the first of what they say will be a series of weekly updates on the number of applications and calls received by the insurance exchange.
An additional 27,300 California households have started to fill out an application. Applications can cover more than one person, such as a spouse or child.
Covered California executive director Peter Lee described the initial interest in the new health coverage as "phenomenal."
"These are big numbers, and they're proof of the pent-up demand for coverage that is here in California and is also across the nation," he told reporters during a news conference.
State exchange officials had anticipated "very low" enrollment during the first week, but did not have an internal projection for how many applications they might initially receive, Lee said.
http://m.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/california-exchange-processes-16000-applications/Content?oid=2600503
Of the countless reasons that congressional Republicans hate the Affordable Care Act enough to shut down the government, the most politically potent is the claim that it will do untold damage to the economy and cripple small companies.
The G.O.P.’s case hinges on the employer mandate, which requires companies with fifty or more full-time employees to provide health insurance. It also regulates the kind of insurance that companies can offer: insurance has to cover at least sixty per cent of costs, and premiums can’t be more than 9.5 per cent of employees’ income. Companies that don’t offer insurance will pay a penalty. Republicans argue that this will hurt companies’ profits, forcing them to stop hiring and to cut workers’ hours, in order to stay below the fifty-employee threshold.
The story is guaranteed to feed the fears of small-business owners. But the overwhelming majority of American businesses—ninety-six per cent—have fewer than fifty employees. The employer mandate doesn’t touch them. And more than ninety per cent of the companies above that threshold already offer health insurance. Only three per cent are in the zone (between forty and seventy-five employees) where the threshold will be an issue. Even if these firms get more cautious about hiring—and there’s little evidence that they will—the impact on the economy would be small.
Meanwhile, the likely benefits of Obamacare for small businesses are enormous. To begin with, it’ll make it easier for people to start their own companies—which has always been a risky proposition in the U.S., because you couldn’t be sure of finding affordable health insurance. As John Arensmeyer, who heads the advocacy group Small Business Majority, and is himself a former small-business owner, told me, “In the U.S., we pride ourselves on our entrepreneurial spirit, but we’ve had this bizarre disincentive in the system that’s kept people from starting new businesses.”
Purely for the sake of health insurance, people stay in jobs they aren’t suited to—a phenomenon that economists call “job lock.” “With the new law, job lock goes away,” Arensmeyer said. “Anyone who wants to start a business can do so independent of the health-care costs.” Studies show that people who are freed from job lock (for instance, when they start qualifying for Medicare) are more likely to undertake something entrepreneurial, and one recent study projects that Obamacare could enable 1.5 million people to become self-employed.
The U.S. likes to think of itself as friendly to small businesses. But, as a 2009 study by the economists John Schmitt and Nathan Lane do ented, our small-business sector is among the smallest in the developed world, and has one of the lowest rates of self-employment. One reason is that we’ve never had anything like national health insurance. In a saner world, changing this would be a reform that the “party of small business” would celebrate.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financ...alk_surowiecki
Liberals Mugged By ObamaCare Reality
Posted 10/08/2013 06:35 PM ET
Irony: While President Obama refuses to consider any delay of ObamaCare, his liberal base is waking up to the fact that "free" health care is awfully expensive. And that they're the ones getting stuck with the bill.
This would be funny if it weren't so hazardous to the country. The news is full of stories of people — many of them ObamaCare supporters — who are only now discovering what Democrats managed to impose on the country.
A story in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Health Insurance Shoppers Suffer Sticker Shock," notes how one resident, S y Ross, "was looking forward to" ObamaCare "because she was hoping to get a better deal."
Instead, Ross discovered that "every plan is going to cost more than what I pay now."
The story features another San Francisco resident who learned that Kaiser was canceling his existing policy because it doesn't comply with ObamaCare's myriad insurance mandates. Kaiser's replacement policy that does comply will cost him $3,672 more a year.
Then there's Michael Yount, a resident of Charlotte, N.C., who told the Christian Science Monitor about how he and his wife face a threefold increase in their premiums — more than $8,900 a year. That's for a policy with the same deductible.
So Yount is planning to drop coverage altogether next year, showing how ObamaCare could easily make the nation's uninsured problem worse, not better.
But as far as delicious irony goes, nothing comes close to the story of Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura, self-described believers in ObamaCare who are now under attack by their own creation.
"Like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance," the San Jose Mercury News reports, "they were floored last week when they opened their bills."
ObamaCare will drive Vinson's annual premiums up by $1,800 and Waschura's by an incredible $10,000.
"I really don't like the Republican tactics," Waschura told the paper, "but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this."
Vinson, however, takes the Mugged by ObamaCare Reality prize. "Of course, I want people to have health care," she said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."
Welcome to the party, Vin. And say "Hi" to all those workers who've had their hours cut or their jobs eliminated because of ObamaCare's employer mandate, the union leaders who are now furious with the law they helped create, and the local government officials now chafing at ObamaCare's costs.
Then, after you've recovered from your overdose of Big Government, maybe you can help organize all your liberal friends to publicly protest this misbegotten law.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editor...care-costs.htm
And to think we still have idiots here saying 0bamacare will be the best thing since sliced bread.
People are shocked that a government program sucks ass?
""free" health care"
who said ACA was free health care?
the uninsured already get free health care in ERs paid by taxpayers and inflated premiums for the insured, and Repugs got nothing to say about.
The persistence of this point of view helps explain how raising the debt limit transformed over the past three years turned from a largely pro forma exercise in grandstanding into a high-stakes game of political chicken with the fate of the global economy hanging in the balance.
The party out of the White House has long used debt limit votes as opportunities to score political points by arguing for spending restraint. Obama himself did this while a senator in 2006, voting against raising the debt ceiling, something the president now says he regrets. The debt limit deniers often point to that vote when making their case.
But these votes were generally done with an understanding that they were symbolic and that a debt limit increase would still pass. That cozy consensus is now pretty much gone, blown away by tea party candidates elected in 2010.
http://m.politico.com/iphone/story/1013/98041.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11699012/n...ss-debt-limit/
WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary John Snow notified Congress on Monday that the administration has now taken “all prudent and legal actions,” including tapping certain government retirement funds, to keep from hitting the $8.2 trillion national debt limit.
In a letter to Congress, Snow urged lawmakers to pass a new debt ceiling immediately to avoid the nation’s first-ever default on its obligations.
“I know that you share the president’s and my commitment to maintaining the full faith and credit of the U.S. government,” Snow said in his letter to leaders in the House and Senate. (damn, this sounds familiar)
Treasury officials, briefing congressional aides last week, said that the government will run out of maneuvering room to keep from exceeding the current limit sometime during the week of March 20.
Snow in his letter notified lawmakers that Treasury would begin tapping the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, which Treasury officials said would provide a “few billion” dollars in extra borrowing ability.
Treasury officials also announced that on Friday they had used the $15 billion in the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a reserve that the Treasury secretary has that is normally used to smooth out volatile movements in the value of the dollar in currency markets.
Treasury has also been taking investments out of a $65.3 billion government pension fund known as the G-fund.
Officials have said that once the debt limit is raised, the investments taken out of the pension funds would be replaced and any lost interest payments would be made up. The formal le for the G-fund is the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System.
Democrats hope to use the upcoming congressional debate over raising the debt limit to highlight what they see as the failings of the administration’s economic program with its emphasis on sweeping tax cuts.
An actual default on the debt, a situation when the government misses making payments to current bondholders, is a doomsday scenario considered highly unlikely given what it would do to the government’s credit rating. (equally unlikely today)
It is expected that after intense debate, Congress will approve an increase in the current $8.18 trillion debt limit by perhaps $781 billion.
The administration has sent Congress a budget that on paper would cut the deficit in half by 2009, the year President Bush leaves office.
But Democrats contend the administration met its deficit-reduction goal only by leaving out major spending items such as the full costs of the Iraq war. They say the deficit will not improve unless Bush abandons his effort to make his first-term tax cuts permanent.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said last week that under President Bush the total of the deficits has increased by $3 trillion, a 40 percent increase from where the national debt — the total of previous deficits — stood when Bush took office in January 2001.
Damn. It's no wonder the servers are melting down.
I don't know why this is so difficult for you to process, but the difference is that in 2006, you did not have democrats denying that not raising the debt limit would be catastrophic for the economy. You have a number of republicans making that claim today. These are the people being labeled extremists. They're extremists. Sorry you don't like the label.
So, they knew it was "catastrophic", but unanimously voted against raising the debt limit (symbolically, of course).
By your own definition, Obama and his fellow dems were extremists. Sorry you don't like the label.
"The party out of the White House has long used debt limit votes"
we don't know what, yet, but the Repugs will come up with another item unrelated to the debt limit to extort action from the Dems, just as killing ACA is totally unrelated to the budget with the Dems totally caved to the Repug budget request. this Repug is different from making "political points", it's outright extortion.
It's called, business as usual. There was actually history before lord Obama became POTUS. You should look into it.
which debt limit or budget fight had the Dems demanding the destruction of a major Federal program unrelated to the debt limit or budget number?
All things held equal, yes.
Given the impact to the economy, it is quite extreme.
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