Obama scrubs "Can I keep my own doctor?" page from healthcare.gov because, well, YOU CAN'T

Who's the worse liar, Obama or Cruz?

Obama lied (among many other things) about his mother's health insurance, but Cruz lied about his religion.

Hmmmmmmmm.

Commentary Magazine's Jonathan Tobin doesn't even read what he cites, making a hash of Obamacare story

Jonathan Tobin here:

"This is something of a misnomer because, as the Heritage Institute pointed out in a paper published last month, almost all of these people were simply added to the rolls of those receiving Medicare. If you only count those who are actually receiving insurance outside of Medicare, the net increase of those with coverage (the number of those buying these policies is offset by an almost equal reduction in the number of customers who have employer-based plans) is only 260,000 people."

Ah, no.

First of all the paper was from the "Heritage Foundation", not the "Heritage Institute". Perhaps he's heard of it? It's only been a Washington fixture since like the Reagan Administration. He does remember Reagan, right? Well, he is a neoconservative.

And it was the rolls of Medicaid which were expanded, not Medicare. What kind of a dummy gets that wrong? Medicare is for older Americans. Medicare is supposed to be paid for through payroll taxes, and it's blowing up as we speak, but that's another story. Medicaid used to be health coverage for the poor and the indigent, provided by the States. Leave it to Obama to expand it from DC and call it insurance.

The middle class of this country will end up poor and indigent and on Medicaid, too, if someone doesn't put a stop to this train wreck called Obamacare and soon.

Middle class people have just had their taxes raised dramatically to provide coverage and subsidies to pay for that coverage to about 9 million people who didn't have it before or didn't have what they're getting now. Middle class taxes went up in the form of health insurance premium increases, raised deductibles and skyrocketing pharmaceutical price increases. Middle class people buying the cheapest of plans now can expect to shell out over $13,000 in premiums and deductibles before their plans pay out one red cent of a big healthcare bill. The incentive for them is to avoid care even when they need it in order to save money.  

All Tobin had to do to get the article moving in the right direction was to actually read the title of the Heritage paper and the accompanying abstract, but apparently he didn't do even that. One wonders if he even wrote the story himself. He is Commentary's "editor" after all.

What a putz. 

Backgrounder #3062 on Health Care

October 15, 2015

2014 Health Insurance Enrollment: Increase Due Almost Entirely to Medicaid Expansion

By Edmund F. Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski

Abstract

Health insurance enrollment data for 2014 shows that the number of Americans with health insurance increased by 9.25 million during the year. However, the vast majority of the increase was the result of 8.99 million individuals being added to the Medicaid rolls. While enrollment in private individual-market plans increased by almost 4.79 million, most of that gain was offset by a reduction of 4.53 million in the number of people with employment-based group coverage. Thus, the net increase in private health insurance in 2014 was just 260,000 people.

ObamaCare's unequal treatment of Americans under the tax law illustrated

Some people who didn't deserve a tax credit are going to get to keep it anyway because of the government's own incompetence administering the credits. I'm sure this makes people who didn't get a credit feel all warm and fuzzy about ObamaCare.

Seen here:

"The White House has said the error could result in some people receiving a tax credit meant to subsidize health insurance coverage by mistake. 

"On Friday, it said people who received the tax credit and had already filed their taxes based on the incorrect forms would not have to refile and could keep the extra tax credit."

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So too bad for you if you haven't already filed your taxes. The corrected form is in the mail and you are obligated to incorporate it in your return.

Obama says you're better off than when he took office, except you are not

click to enlarge

Obama says, quoted here:

"Like the rest of America, black America in the aggregate is better off now than it was when I came into office."

On the contrary:

Full-time jobs have not recovered to their 2007 peak and won't until summer 2015, if we are lucky. That will be eight years later, when full-time jobs in the past have always bounced back after at most three years in post-war recessions. Obama has done nothing for jobs, except to let the problem fester and try to heal itself.

Health insurance costs much more, covers much less and has narrower and less convenient networks. The proof of this is in the polling, where the majority of Americans remain opposed to ObamaCare. The minority which likes ObamaCare is benefiting from it at the expense of those who don't, who are more numerous. It's called income redistribution. Otherwise known as socialism. You know, like in Cuba, Obama's new best friend.

Owners' equity in household real estate stands at 53.94%, still almost 10% below where it was in 2005. Completed foreclosures in the last month are still running 95% above normal.

More than half of the 66% of Americans who have saved anything for retirement have individually saved less than $25,000. American taxpayers are forced to contribute on average 13.5% to the pensions of the country's government employees and save for themselves only at the rate of 5%.

But perhaps the most damning indictment of Obama is how Americans of all stripes have been impoverished under his watch. Real median household income in the US is lower now than when the recession ended in Obama's first term in 2009, and much lower than when he took office:

"At this point, real household incomes are in worse shape than they were four years ago when the recession ended."

Lies told often enough can become the truth, but they are still lies.

More ObamaCare Lies: Enrollments inflated by a million by adding in dental plans

Lying is the modus operandi of Democrats under Obama, as in: You can keep your health insurance, you can keep your doctor, and you will save, save!, on average $2,500 per year! All lies of course, but now this, just a minor detail really, but indicative of the fraud at the heart of the Obama presidency from the beginning.

From the story here:

Blending dental and medical plans let the administration assert that enrollment was more than 7 million. The move also partly obscured the attrition of more than 1 million in the number of people enrolled in medical insurance.

Jonathan Gruber exposed in a sixth video, touting how he deliberately designed ObamaCare to mislead

Jake Tapper for CNN here:

In previously posted but only recently noticed speeches, Gruber discusses how those pushing the bill took part in an "exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter," taking advantage of voters' "stupidity" to create a law that would ultimately be good for them.

The issue at hand in this sixth video is known as the "Cadillac tax," which was represented as a tax on employers' expensive health insurance plans. While employers do not currently have to pay taxes on health insurance plans they provide employees, starting in 2018, companies that provide health insurance that costs more than $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family will have to pay a 40 percent tax. ...

"It turns out politically it's really hard to get rid of," Gruber said. "And the only way we could get rid of it was first by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it's a tax on people who hold those insurance plans." ...

The second way was have the tax kick in "late, starting in 2018. But by starting it late, we were able to tie the cap for Cadillac Tax to CPI, not medical inflation," Gruber said. CPI is the consumer price index, which is lower than medical inflation.

Gruber explains that by drafting the bill this way, they were able to pass something that would initially only impact some employer plans though it would eventually hit almost every employer plan. And by that time, those who object to the tax will be obligated to figure out how to come up with the money that repealing the tax will take from the treasury, or risk significantly adding to the national debt.

Republican Larry Hogan wins governorship against "the most incompetent man in Maryland"

WaPo tells the truth here, twenty-eight paragraphs in:

Both campaigns went negative from the outset. On the day after his primary win, Hogan released a Web ad calling Brown “the most incompetent man in Maryland.” It was a reference, in part, to Brown’s role in the state’s botched rollout of the online health insurance marketplace established under the federal Affordable Care Act.

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And it is said this election wasn't about ObamaCare.

New IRS 1040 clearly shows you'll owe ObamaCare TAX liability on line 61 if you don't have coverage

So in addition to lying about getting to keep your health insurance if you like it, Obama also clearly lied about not raising taxes on anybody making less than $250,000 a year.

With housing ATM shut down, Americans tapped retirements prematurely in 2011 to the tune of $57 billion

So says the story here at Bloomberg, extrapolating using the basic early withdrawal penalty rate of 10%:

It’s a small number that’s part of a much larger picture: The Internal Revenue Service collected $5.7 billion in 2011 from penalties, meaning that Americans took out about $57 billion from retirement funds before they were supposed to.

The median size of a 401(k) is $24,400 as of March 31, with people older than 55 having $65,300, according to Fidelity Investments. Those funds can disappear quickly in retirement, and the early withdrawals indicate that the coming retirement crisis could be even more acute than expected. ...

Meanwhile, the amount of home-equity loans outstanding was $704 billion in 2013, down 38 percent from the 2007 peak, according to Federal Reserve data. ...

During the 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama proposed allowing penalty-free withdrawals of up to $10,000 from retirement accounts. That idea went nowhere and wasn’t included in the 2009 economic stimulus.

In 2012, the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants proposed a temporary waiver of the penalties while families were recovering from the recession.

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Actually the premature withdrawals could have been significantly higher than $57 billion in 2011. There are many exceptions to the 10% penalty rule, one of which is for withdrawals to pay for health insurance premia, which began jumping in the wake of the passage of ObamaCare in March 2010. Careful taxpayers withdrew exactly for that growing expense, paid no penalty and in certain circumstances also deducted the expense from income when self-employed. Since those sums escaped the 10% penalty, additional sums withdrawn probably contributed to the total penalties collected in 2011.

Three Cheers For Dana Rohrabacher: Christian Love Is Furthered By Individual, Not Government, Action

Quoted here at 218, the blog of the oligarchy:

"No. 1, a policy of legalizing the people who are here, the sort of easy way out, would in the long run put 40 million new people into our country, which would change the nature of our country, and that would be a bad thing, not to mention breaking the bank, etc."

“Also, my response was that Christian love is not furthered by advocacy of government policy but instead by individual action and commitment."

“Individual commitment is not individual commitment to changing a government policy, it is to come out and help specific people and people who are in need, and if [the pastors] really wanted to help people who are here illegally or in bad situations they, they want to pay for their health insurance and everything, then I would be saying how wonderful that is. But if they are advocating that the government do that, then it will break our bank and destroy our country.”

New Gallup Poll of 20,000 Estimates ObamaCare Has Fallen Far Short Of Insuring The Uninsured

The story is here:

Overall, 11.8% of U.S. adults say they got a new health insurance policy in 2014. One-third of this group, or 4% nationally, say they did not have insurance in 2013. Another 7.5% got a new policy this year that replaced a previous policy. The rest either did not respond or were uncertain about their previous insurance status.

The key figure is the 4% who are newly insured in 2014, which most likely represents Americans' response to the individual mandate requirement the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This estimate of the newly insured broadly aligns with the reduction Gallup has seen in the national uninsured rate from 2013 to the first days of April 2014. However, the calculation of the newly insured does not take into account those who may have been insured in 2013 but not in 2014.

The ACA envisioned that the new healthcare exchanges would be the main place where uninsured Americans would get their insurance this year, but it appears that a sizable segment of the newly insured Americans used another mechanism. These sources presumably include employee policies, Medicaid, and other private policies not arranged through exchanges.

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If the adult population is presently about 247 million, 11.8% with new insurance in 2014 is 29 million adults.

If 33% of them had no insurance in 2013 (or 4% of the adult population), that's about only 9.6 million to 9.9 million newly insured who weren't previously, leaving 20 million uninsured yet to sign up. Estimates of the total uninsured previously had been widely estimated at 30-40 million Americans.

If the whole point of ObamaCare was to provide insurance to those who didn't have it or couldn't get it, so far ObamaCare is therefore not much of a success, especially since it has caused an upheaval for everyone else who has had insurance, which Obama told us we could keep if we liked it.

Replacement policies going to an additional 7.5% of the adult population who were previously insured means 18.5 million people have had to replace their insurance or wanted to replace their insurance because of ObamaCare, three times as many as the 6 million widely reported to have had their policies canceled because of ObamaCare late in 2013.

That leaves less than a million in the category who were uncertain about their previous insurance status.

It remains to be seen how many saying they have new insurance simply signed up for Medicaid because they didn't qualify for a health insurance subsidy because their income was too low. In Michigan a family of three that doesn't make at least $20,000 a year typically gets forced into Medicaid under ObamaCare if that family wants coverage and hopes to avoid a "tax" for failing to obtain coverage.

Evidently even such a family could avoid the tax, and Medicaid, by making a "hardship" claim.

h/t Chris

Survey of 7,500 adults says 5.4 million uninsured now have insurance!

Let's see.

The regime says 7.1 million have signed up for ObamaCare.

A new survey of just 7,500 adults says 5.4 million previously uninsured now have it because of ObamaCare. That's right. A survey of 7,500 tells us about millions.

But 6 million actually lost their insurance last year because of ObamaCare because their plans were non-compliant (too bad they weren't all Jewish--at least then we'd never hear the end of it), and had to scramble to replace their coverage, presumably under ObamaCare.

So why isn't the administration reporting 11.4 million signups? Or 13.1 million? Or hundreds of millions?

This farce gets funnier by the minute (does anyone know what Mel Brooks has been up to?).

From the story here:

At least 5.4 million people without health insurance have obtained coverage since last September—and that number will likely climb in coming weeks, a new survey found. ... "This is a great result, it's really exciting, it's really encouraging," said Katherine Hempstead, director of coverage for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The organization helped fund the survey, which was conducted by researchers from the nonpartisan Urban Institute, and questioned 7,500 adults ages 18 to 64.

Obama Regime Admits Late Last Friday Afternoon That ObamaCare Will Increase Costs For Most Small Employers On Top Of 90% Increase Since 2009

WaPo here:

Nearly two-thirds of small businesses that currently offer health insurance to their workers will pay more for coverage as a result of new rules in the health care law, as will millions of small-business employees and their family members, according to new estimates released by the Obama administration. ... roughly 11 million of the 17 million individuals who have health care plans through a small employer will see their premiums increase as a result of the new rules on insurers in the law, while 6 million people will enjoy lower premiums. If accurate, it would continue a steady climb in insurance costs for many small businesses. Ninety-six percent of small businesses say their premiums have increased in the past five years, with the average monthly insurance cost soaring from $590 per employee in 2009 to $1,121 in 2014, according to poll released earlier this month by the National Small Business Administration.

Garden Variety Armed Lawlessness Is Now Terrorism

"The state exercises the monopoly of crime"

See how this works folks? 

Under terror laws they can basically declare you an enemy of the state, deny you all your rights, lock you up and throw away the key if they feel like it. And as we all know by now only too well, Obama is setting precedents and records for what he feels like doing and doesn't feel like doing, whether it's enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act, taking out an American citizen abroad with a drone without due process of law, or enforcing his own health insurance reform legislation.

The story is here, how an irate Pennsylvania homeowner pulled a gun on a snowplow driver who inadvertently parked some snow on the guy's lawn:

"Eckert has been charged with aggravated assault, terroristic threats, disorderly conduct, and recklessly endangering another person."

Why HealthCare.gov still isn't fixed: Obama regime quietly dumps CGI Federal on Friday, to hire Accenture which built California exchange

WaPo reports here:

The Obama administration has decided to jettison from HealthCare.gov the IT contractor, CGI Federal, that has been mainly responsible for building the defect-ridden online health insurance marketplace and has been immersed in the work of repairing it.

Federal health officials are preparing to sign early next week a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, according to a person familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private negotiations.

... it is not yet able to automatically enroll people eligible for Medicaid in states’ programs, compute exact amounts to be sent to insurers for their customers’ federal subsidies or tabulate precisely how many consumers have paid their insurance premiums and are therefore covered.

... As federal officials and contractors have been trying to fix various aspects of the Web site in the past few months, about half the new software code the company has written failed when it was first used, according to internal federal information.

Government Just Made Two Things You Liked Obsolete: Your Health Insurance And The Lightbulb

Tim Carney, here, says the government ban on the traditional lightbulb is a case of crony capitalism in which industry persuaded government to help it increase energy efficiencies profits by eliminating the bulbs which consumers preferred in order to give them bulbs they didn't want but which cost a lot more, boosting profits they couldn't otherwise make.

You know, just like ObamaCare gives you coverages you neither want nor need and makes your insurance much more expensive than it used to be, and forces everyone to buy it. Insurance companies are happy to get all the new customers, and all the extra profits.

Big business is the enemy of Americans, and of capitalism. Unfortunately, so is the government.

Libertarians At Forbes Completely Misrepresent The Mortgage Interest Deduction

Here:

The mortgage interest deduction (MID) is the largest personal tax deduction on the books and is widely considered one of the most sacrosanct tax benefits in the country because it is seen as making homeownership more affordable for middle-class Americans. Our new Reason Foundation research suggests, though, that the average benefits from the MID are not enough to be the difference between renting and home owning for a household.

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If there's a sacrosanct tax benefit in this country, which by the way benefits mostly upper income people who also pay most of the taxes, it's reduced rates of taxation on dividends and long term capital gains, which the Joint Committee on Taxation says costs the federal government $596 billion in lost revenue between 2012 and 2016. The mortgage interest deduction, by contrast, will cost the feds $364 billion. Leave it to Forbes not to mention that.

The mortgage interest deduction may or may not be "the largest personal" deduction, but in the big picture of revenue forfeited by the feds due to tax preferences, which is categorized as "tax loss expenditure", the mortgage interest deduction represents just 6.9% of the revenue lost out of the largest 21 line items in the JCT's report representing $5.25 trillion in tax loss expenditures for the period mentioned (here).

Preferential treatment of income from stocks isn't the biggest preference either (11.4%), but it is much bigger than the preference given to mortgage interest. But businesses do get the biggest preference. When employers provide healthcare contributions, health insurance and long term care insurance, they get to deduct all of that. Cost to the feds? A whopping $706.6 billion (13.5%). And that figure will only grow under ObamaCare.

And how about retirement plan contributions? Cost of excluding both defined benefit and defined contribution plans comes to $505.3 billion over the period (9.6%).

Compared to these, the mortgage interest deduction comes in a distant fourth (in fifth is the earned income tax credit at $319.7 billion).

The much-maligned charitable deduction, meanwhile, which was the original basis for the standard deduction in the tax code, at $172.4 billion represents just 3.3% of the lost $5.25 trillion in revenue from 2012 to 2016. It comes in fourteenth.

There's lots of things wrong with the world, but changing the home mortgage interest deduction isn't going to fix them. For libertarians to focus on it as they do should tell you there's more going on here than meets the eye: an ideological bias against home ownership because it limits "freedom". Millions beg to differ.

Largest Sums Of Federal Revenue Forfeited Because Of The Tax Code, Joint Committee On Taxation, 2012-2016

$706.6 billion: exclusion of employer contributions for healthcare, health insurance premiums and long term care insurance premiums.

$596.0 billion: reduced rates of taxation on dividends and long term capital gains.

$505.3 billion: net exclusion of pension contributions and earnings to defined benefit/contribution plans.

$364.0 billion: mortgage interest deduction.

$319.7 billion: earned income tax credit.

$305.0 billion: exclusion of Medicare Parts A&B benefits.

$289.4 billion: credit for children under 17.

$259.2 billion: deduction of nonbusiness state and local government income taxes, sales taxes and personal property taxes.

$239.7 billion: deferral of active income of controlled foreign corporations.

$236.1 billion: exclusion of capital gains at death.

$184.3 billion: subsidies for participation in healthcare exchanges.

$182.8 billion: exclusion of interest on public purpose state and local government bonds.

$175.8 billion: exclusion of benefits provided under cafeteria plans.

$172.4 billion: deduction for charitable contributions.

$172.1 billion: exclusion of untaxed Social Security and railroad retirement benefits.

$153.8 billion: exclusion of investment income on life insurance and annuity contracts.

$143.0 billion: property tax deduction.

$124.1 billion: exclusion of capital gains on the sale of a home.

$119.1 billion: credits for tuition for post-secondary education.

Over Two Times As Many Getting Stuck With Medicaid Vs. Insurance Under ObamaCare

"Coverage" does not equal care.

The Detroit News reports here:

Nationwide, 1.9 million people completed online applications in October and November, but just 365,000 selected an insurance plan. Those planning to buy on the health insurance marketplace — healthcare.gov — must enroll by Dec. 23 to have a policy in effect by Jan. 1. ... An additional 803,077 Americans were found eligible for Medicaid or the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program. That number includes 7,363 residents of Michigan, one of 25 states and the District of Columbia that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.