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Prelude To A Lie
“Let me be exactly clear,” he said, at which point prudent Americans everywhere reached furtively for their wallets, because clarity to Barack Obama becomes a dismal and dangerous fog of dissimulation for everyone else. The prelude out of the way, the conductor continued:
First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.
In a purely sophistical sense, that last sentence may be correct. They didn’t talk about it. They just did it. But the rest of that statement is as blatant a lie as we’ve heard from any president since Bill Clinton denied using a subordinate as a humidor. And whereas Clinton was exposed, so to speak, as having dallied with one vulnerable young lady, we now face a situation in which the whole country is getting the shaft. Please though, don’t take my word for it:
Florida Blue has cancelled the health insurance policies of 300,000 Floridians which, according to Kaiser Health News Reports, wipes out about 80 percent of Florida Blue’s individual insurance business. The culprit? The existing policies don’t meet the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act’s “guidelines.”
For it’s part Kaiser Permanente, in California, has sent cancellation notices to 160,000 of its customers, which constitutes about half of its individual insurance business in that state. Blue Shield of California has had to cancel 119,000 of its policies as well, sacking 60 percent of its individual business.
Thus far, hundreds of thousands of people across the country are seeing their policies cancelled which, according to Forbes, is more people than have filed an exchange account for Obamacare on his shiny new website. So much for being able to keep your plan.
Which reminds me. Remember this gem from the President in 2012?
You should know that once we have fully implemented, you’re going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you’re an employee at a big company you can get right now — which means your premiums will go down.
Steve Sauls begs to differ. Actually, he isn’t begging. He’s posting a screen shot of the actual plan on Twitter, adding, “You call this a great health care plan?”
Salon editor Joan Walsh, took to Twitter to say of Obamacare, that if she didn’t already have health insurance, she would, “…be rushing to sign up for it,” notwithstanding the fact that no one can rush anywhere on healthcare.gov. Another Twitter user replied, “I have insurance too. It is being discontinued in favor of making me buy a worse Obamacare policy costing twice as much.”
And if that isn’t change we can believe in, how’s this? J. McNamara, posted a photo of his hopey changey notice 
informing him that his monthly premiums had gone from $58 per month up to $2,031.78 per month, because fundamental transformation can’t happen on the cheap, the President’s promises notwithstanding.
Perhaps Kay summed it up best when she wrote, “I’d rather poke out my eyeballs than go to #healthcare.gov site again.”
I’m with you, Kay, though I fear poking one’s eyeballs might be the easier of the options available to us under the solicitous attentions of our benevolent would-be masters in Washington DC. They have failed to take into account that many of us would no sooner be serfs than did our ancestors, or, to quote Bill Buckley:
The Right does not blame everything on the Left, believing as we do that all human beings are to a dangerous degree mess-inclined, and that any plans for us made by human beings with super-duper ideas had better take this fact into consideration, as also this other fact, that their idea of what is super-duper may not appeal to me at all, and that I count, ex officio, as a human being.
For as surely as modern liberalism represents a systematic effort to depose the individual from his freedom, it cannot depose the realities of economics or of human nature. A lie cannot live indefinitely, for in the end Obamacare will take its place in the graveyard of grand delusions, a victim of its own arrogance and official incompetence. That it should do so sooner rather than later, and spare as many people as possible the misery of exorbitant costs, inadequate administration and wretched “care,” is the cause to which we renew our determination.
Published in General
Barry could have reduced premiums via the creation of larger pools by allowing cross-state coverages. He could have block-granted insurance dollars to states to cover their uninsured when they inevitably hit the hospital. Both of those things would work, would not cause destruction in in the insurance markets, and people would be happy.
Instead, we’re getting the destruction of the insurance industry, both for-profit and not-for-profit insurers, and reduced coverages, skyrocketing premiums (not just small percentage increases, but in some cases exponential increases in price), and an enormous yawn from the WH about “glitches” and iPhones.
Congratulations, Barry. Mission accomplished.
The only possible positive result that can come of this is that a market based health care system for the middle class might result. It will be painful and messy, if that happens.
The Obamacare disaster cannot be reversed. Health insurance companies did not want the individual policy business because it is a money loser. Obama said one true thing. It would be worthwhile if we could buy health insurance in a setting not connected to employment. In Germany, there are “sickness funds” based on the city where you live or your union. France has health care funds based on gross career descriptions, such as all clerical workers.
Neither country, so far as I know, tries to pay for every interaction with a provider. In France, the fund pays a flat rate for an office visit or surgery but the patient pays what they have negotiated with the doctor or hospital and the payment from the fund comes after. The schedule of charges is public, unlike our secret insurance contracts. Medicare pays about 20% of billed charges and it is illegal to charge any more, even to an uninsured person.
Brilliant and lyrical as always.
I would take exception to your conclusion, however:
Breitbart and Shapiro have told you, you need to be aggressive; unrelenting–you, we, America needs to destroy the liberal media if what you claim has a chance of becoming reality.
Why was TASS and Pravda so important to the Politburo?
You know why, and you watched as the USSR public bought into, or pretended to buy into (which amounts to the same thing) all the lies about how good things were; how much things were improving; how successfully the socialist experiment was progressing.
If things weren’t perfect, at least they were making moral choices: all must be equal, all must prosper at the same level, it is unfair that some should succeed while others fail and suffer.
The West, if they prospered, it was due to decadence.
Dave, you think you’re stating the obvious. And you are. But the Poor Dumb SOBs won’t ever read you.
They only read the truth.
Pravda means “truth.”
What we could see is the development, already begun, of a cash payment system backed up with real insurance for insurable events, like heart attacks or appendicitis.
We will see as this develops. If this happens, it might look something like this: http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/39591.html
That is a different Kay than me, because I don’t want to be both deaf and blind, but I sure agree with her, not wanting to be a part of this nonsense. When I received my notice from BC/BS MT that they had sold out to Health Care Service Corporation of Chicago, and will let me know what my premiums will be, (which they haven’t done as yet) I called and dropped out, and will pay cash.
Cheer up everybody, the Marines are getting new covers. That’s something to look forward to at least.
Fabulous!
One interesting thing about Obama’s statement:
“You should know that once we have fully implemented, you’re going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you’re an employee at a big company you can get right now …”
This much of the statement might actually be true, but then when I was working, (before I was laid off, due to delays in contracts from the sequester) my last company had a good medical plan through United Health Care, where is was calculated we the employees would wind up paying about 20% of overall costs, the company self-insured, UHC managed the plan, but the company cost for our plan, 2 years ago for family coverage was over $23,000 per year, and my cost was another roughly $4500 per year from salary deductions, co-insurance, and co-pays. So this was for the “good rates”, if we look at those total costs, it was about $2300 per month, seems Obamacare isn’t cheap, the lie was saying your premium would go down. But you are paying all of it!
All this talk of nobody and poking out eyeballs reminds me of Odysseus and the cyclops Polyphemus. Behold President Nobody.
The “eyes” have it. I know, I know….
Great. The Air Force has played musical uniforms for so long now that they barely have any traditional garb left, but the Marines’ uniforms are legendary. Must they now all resemble Charles de Gaulle?
Fabulous! ·46 minutes ago
Banana republic style hats for the military Republic of Bananamerica.
Behold our president:
By the way, Dave, you’d have a lot more comments if you’d stop writing so well and comprehensively. You leave very little to add, subtract, emend. I think you’re just showing off.
I’ll throw in more typos next time. Bad spellers of the world, untie!
When will we hear about the impact on employees outside the individual market? Enrollment starts around November, if I recall correctly. Right now the big complaints are coming from individual purchasers. Just wait until these prices hit groups like union workers.
My Child Bride has coverage for our family through her 20 plus years of employment with the State of California. It is great coverage, but it is expensive. We we thinking of starting a pool, wagering on when the State government will throw state employees into the Covered California Exchange…
Prefect.
It’s just that we all so much agree with you, you don’t leave us much to say, except, right on!
I did get my enrollment package from Sacramento Co, CA today. Now living out of state becomes a problem. If I want supplemental coverage to Medicare from my ex-employer. I have now been given the option of United Healthcare HMO for self only $175.81 or NPPO for $257.56. No indication of out of state cost or if Montana even has any kind of United Healthcare. Well, of course, there is no “in Network” for PPO in Montana. Silly me.
That plan offered by Sacramento County is a Medicare Advantage Plan. Fppst!
Where this is going:
Complete destruction of price system (i.e., finishing the job begun decades ago on the medical industry).
‘Proof’ that the private sector is incapable of providing health insurance at ‘reasonable’ costs per the Obamacare mandates (as per plan – no entity could provide such an uneconomic plan sans lifetime caps, etc.). To be followed by legislation or maybe unilateral creation by HHS of stopgap health insurance protection funded with the taxing and borrowing power of the Federal government. The Government rides in on its chariot driven by white horses to save the day!