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Charles Krauthammer says we know what ”the lie of the year” is, but what is the story of the year?
The lie of the year, according to Politifact, is “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is — which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place.
Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime.
In fact, Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover. The keep-your-plan-if-you-like-your-plan ruse was a way of saying to the millions of Americans who had insurance and liked what they had: Don’t worry. You’ll be left unmolested. For you, everything goes on as before.
That was a fraud from the very beginning. The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges where they would be made to overpay — forced to purchase government-mandated services they don’t need — as a way to subsidize others. (That’s how you get to the ostensible free lunch.)
It wasn’t until the first cancellation notices went out in late 2013 that the deception began to be understood. …
Jonathan Tobin thinks the latest healthcare exemption shows the law is unraveling.
Only a few months ago, the White House and Democrats scoffed when Republicans suggested that the implementation of ObamaCare be postponed in order for the government to understand exactly what it was foisting upon the country. Nothing could stop the administration’s determination to roll out the president’s signature health-care legislation on time. All liberals and some conservatives as well were convinced that once it began, the debate about its wisdom would cease as the extension of benefits would make it as universally popular as Social Security and Medicare. But though the White House is still insisting that all will come right in the end, they may be wishing they had taken the GOP’s offer. In the latest example of the problems the administration has encountered in trying to make ObamaCare work, it announced late yesterday that yet another aspect of the law will be delayed. As the New York Times reports:
Millions of people facing the cancellation of health insurance policies will be allowed to buy catastrophic coverage and will be exempt from penalties if they go without insurance next year, the White House said Thursday night.
Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed the sudden policy shift in a letter to Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and five other senators. It was another effort by President Obama to cushion the impact of the health care law and minimize political damage to himself and Democrats in Congress who adopted the law in 2010 over solid Republican opposition.
The decision is an attempt to shield Democrats from voter outrage about the impact of the law until after the 2014 midterm elections. But while beleaguered Democrats are happy of any reprieve, however belated, the decision comes too late to avoid adding to the general public impression of the rollout as a disaster that doesn’t seem to get better despite repeated White House promises that the worst is behind them. Taken as a whole, the list of exemptions and delays in the implementation of the misnamed Affordable Care Act is leaving the country asking what exactly were all the geniuses in the West Wing and the Department of Health and Human Services doing during the two years between the bill’s passage and the start of this fiasco?
Megan McArdle agrees.
… The White House is focused on winning the news cycle, day by day, not the kind of detached technocratic policymaking that they, and the law’s other supporters, hoped this law would embody. Does your fix create problems later, cause costs to spiral or people to drop out of the insurance market, or lead to political pressure to expand the fixes in ways that critically undermine the law? Well, that’s preferable to sudden death right now.
However incoherent these fixes may seem, they send two messages, loud and clear. The first is that although liberal pundits may think that the law is a done deal, impossible to repeal, the administration does not believe that. The willingness to take large risks with the program’s stability indicates that the administration thinks it has a huge amount to lose — that the White House is in a battle for the program’s very existence, not a few marginal House and Senate seats.
And the second is that enrollment probably isn’t what the administration was hoping. I don’t know that we’ll start Jan. 1 with fewer people insured than we had a year ago, but this certainly shouldn’t make us optimistic. It’s not like people who lost their insurance due to Obamacare, and now can’t afford to replace their policy, are going to be happy that they’re exempted from the mandate; they’re still going to be pretty mad. This is at best, damage control. Which suggests that the administration is expecting a fair amount of damage.
Turning to the fortunes of Scott Brown, late of Massachusetts, Jennifer Rubin thinks he can go to New Hampshire and win a senate seat there courtesy of the affordable care act.
Scott Brown is relocating to New Hampshire, which we take as a near-certain sign he will run for Senate from that state. His potential opponent, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), should be very nervous. Like many Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2014, she will have a mammoth Obamacare problem. In fiscally tight New Hampshire, Shaheen’s refusal to attack entitlements and address our long-term debt will not sit well. She ran as an independent voice and is now stuck to President Obama and his failing presidency like Velcro.
Moreover, Brown would be a candidate — albeit one who will have to beat back the carpetbagger attack — well suited for New Hampshire, experienced in running a Senate campaign, well-versed on the issues and fully vetted as a senatorial candidate. In a speech recently at the Ronald Reagan dinner in Iowa, Brown showed how effective he is in connecting with ordinary voters:
“I became a Republican when I was poor. … Before I was a year old, my Dad went his own way … and, unfortunately, he never really came back. My Mom raised my sister and me alone, working as a waitress, sometimes depending on welfare, and generally doing her best. We moved 17 times in 18 years. If it wasn’t to another cheap apartment or second-floor walk-up, then we were the needy visitors in other people’s homes.
I had a series of stepdads. Two out of 3 of them had a mean streak, and a few drinks made it a violent streak.
Both those guys brought a lot of fear into our lives and with no father to protect me, there were times in my boyhood when it felt like I couldn’t trust anyone.”
No, his biography is not the stereotypical Republican one. And as a result, he can convey with sincerity a theme now heard increasingly from conservatives, namely that liberalism has failed the poor and conservatives have something better to offer:
John Fund says the ad that all Dems should fear has been rolled out for the Scott Brown campaign in New Hampshire.
The conservative group Ending Spending may have premiered the ad that nationalizes the 2014 midterm elections around Obamacare.
The 30-second killer ad was produced by Republican media consultant Larry McCarthy and goes after Jeanne Shaheen, the first-term Democratic Senator from New Hampshire who is likely to face former GOP Senator Scott Brown next year.
The ad begins with footage of Shaheen on the Senate floor echoing President Obama by saying, “if you like your insurance you can keep it.” An overlay graphic points out that Obama was given the “Lie of the Year” award from a fact-checking group for that whopper. …
Now for the fun – it’s time for pajama boy!. We’ll let John Hinderaker from Power Line do the intro.
One of the central imperatives of Obamacare is to persuade healthy young people to pay way too much for health insurance in order to subsidize the older and sicker. So far, this doesn’t seem to be happening. So the administration has embarked on a PR campaign that conveys a whiff of desperation. In part, the campaign has been geared to the holiday season, and the administration was justly ridiculed for a series of tweets urging the party’s faithful to bring up health insurance at their families’ Thanksgiving dinners, aided by a typically misleading Obamacare “fact sheet.”
Yesterday, the administration’s pro-Obamacare campaign jumped the–no, wait, you can’t say that anymore. It went around the bend. Over the top. With this ad, tweeted by OFA, President Obama’s permanent campaign organization:
Pajama Boy was born, and the hilarity ensued immediately. A doofus in a plaid onesie drinking hot chocolate–is this really how the Obama administration pictures its supporters? Pajama Boy takes the absurdity of the “talk about health insurance” campaign to new depths. Merciless ridicule has been heaped on the administration; see, for example, the reaction at Twitchy. (“Obama appeals to the core ‘grown man in a onesie’ demographic.”)
Jim Geraghty has more.
Where to begin? That appears to be a plaid adult onesie, and this is really testing my libertarian live-and-let-live limits. I suspect there’s a reason grown men don’t usually wear onesies. Probably something to do with zippers and midnight trips to the bathroom, and how you really don’t want anything down there getting caught when you’re half asleep and zipping up.
By the way, if you’re in the market for a plaid adult onesie, apparently they cost $69.95. What you wear to bed is your business, but that seems like a lot of money for something you sleep in.
Of course, he’s not sleeping in that; he’s having hot chocolate and discussing health insurance.
Naturally, the Photoshop folks went crazy with the pajama boy picture and we have many of those for you. However prolonged viewing of the image of a twenty-something guy in a onesie pajama needs an antidote. For that we have a series of pics of girls with guns. You don’t want to miss those. Mrs. Pickerhead might not be amused, so this might happen just once.