Obamacare Is Another Private Sector Rip-Off Of Americans


Paul Craig Roberts
Prison Planet.com
October 2, 2013

The government of the “world’s only superpower,” the “exceptional,” the “indispensable” country, claims to know what is best for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, China, indeed for the entire world. However, the “indispensable” country cannot even govern itself, much less the world over which the “superpower” desires hegemony. The government of the “world’s only superpower” has shut itself down.


The government has shut itself down, because it cannot deal with the budget deficit and mounting public debt caused by twelve years of wars, by financial deregulation that allows “banks too big to fail” to loot the taxpayers, and by the loss of jobs, GDP, and tax base that jobs offshoring forced by Wall Street caused.

The Republicans are using the fight over the limit on new public debt to block Obamacare. The Republicans are right to oppose Obamacare, but they are opposing Obamacare largely for ideological reasons when there are very good sound reasons to oppose Obamacare.

Last February 3, I posted on this website a column, “Obamacare: A Deception,” written by an expert on the subject. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/02/03/obamacare-a-primer/

When Republicans for ideological reasons blocked a single-payer health system like the rest of the developed world has and, indeed, even some developing countries have, the Obama regime, needing a victory, went to the insurance companies and told them to come up with a health care plan that the insurance lobby could get passed by Congress. Obamacare was written by the private insurance industry with the goal of raising its profits with 50 million mandated new customers.

Obamacare works for the insurance companies, but not for the uninsured. The cost of using Obamacare is prohibitive for those who most need the health coverage. The cost of the premiums net of the government subsidy is large. It amounts to a substantial pay cut for people struggling to pay their bills. In addition to the premium cost, it is prohibitive for hard pressed Americans to use the policies because of the deductibles and co-pays. For the very poor, who are thrown into Medicaid systems, any assets they might have, such as a home, are subject to confiscation to cover their Medicaid bills. The only people other than the insurance companies who benefit from Obamacare are the down and out who are devoid of all assets.

This might prove to be a growing percentage of Americans. On September 19 the New York Times on the front page of the business section reported what I have reported for years: that real median family incomes in the US are where they were a quarter of a century ago. In other words, in a quarter of a century there has been no income growth for the median American family.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

In 2013 payroll employment is below where it was six years ago. During 2013 most of the new jobs, barely sufficient to stay even with population growth and insufficient to recover the job loss from the recession, have been part-time jobs that do not provide any discretionary income with which to drive a consumer economy.

Obamacare has resulted in the health insurance companies, who thought that they would be living in high profits from the mandated health coverage, being outsmarted by employers, who have reduced their full-time workers to part-time in order to avoid Omamacare’s requirement to provide health coverage to those employees who work 30 hours a week or more.

Employers can get away with this, because jobs are hard to find. The lack of employment opportunities results in Americans with engineering degrees working as retail sales clerks and as shelf stockers in Walmart and Home Depot. Despite the abundance of unemployed and under-employed American technical and engineering workers, the large corporations lobby Congress for more H-1B visas to bring in lowly paid foreigners with the argument that there is a shortage of qualified Americans for technical work.

As I have pointed out so many times, if there were a shortage of engineering and technical workers, salaries would be rising, not falling.

For millions of employees, Obamacare means cut hours and less take home pay plus out-of-pocket expenses to purchase an Obamacare health policy. For most people covered by Obamacare, this is a lose-lose situation.

It is also a lose-loss situation for the vast majority of the young. Most young people, unless they have jobs that provide health coverage, do without it, because the chances of the young having heart attacks, cancer, and other serious health problems is low.

Obamacare, however, requires the healthy young to pay premiums for coverage or to pay a penalty to the IRS.

In my day this might not have been a problem. However, today there are few jobs for the young that pay enough to have an independent existence. The monthly payroll jobs reports do not show well-paying jobs. The Labor Department’s projections of future jobs are not jobs that pay well. For the youth, it seems that the penalty is less than the premium, so youthful penalties paid out of waitress and bartender tips will subsidize the unusable Obamacare health policies for the poor adults who are not thrown into Medicare, which confiscates their assets, if any.

Obamacare benefits only two classes of people. It benefits employers who drop their employees working hours below the hours specified for Obamacare coverage, and it benefits the insurance companies or the IRS who collect the premiums and penalties.
Many of the people who pay the premiums won’t be able to use the policies because of co-pays and deductions.

The very poor with no assets might receive health care if they reside in states that accept the Medicaid provisions of Obamacare.

In 21st century America, the few people who have experienced income gains are the executives and shareholders of firms who offshored their production for US markets, Wall Street which makes bets covered by the Federal Reserve, and the military-security complex which has been enriched by the neoconservatives’ wars.

Every other American has lost.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

Obamacare sign-up crash: what’s really behind it?


Jon Rappoport
Prison Planet.com
October 11, 2013

It’s easy to say the government always screws things up and, therefore, the crash of its Obamacare sign-up system is merely another example of gross incompetence.

But this is shortsighted. White House officials knew, months ago, the online site was an unmitigated disaster, and yet they let the train continue speeding down the track to its inevitable crackup.

To understand this, we need to go back to the opening salvo in the Obamacare drama.

To his advisors’ shock and surprise, Obama, taking office in 2009, announced that his first big move was going to be national health insurance.

His people assumed jobs would be the top priority. The nation was clamoring for a solution. People were out of work. Banks were foreclosing on homes. Families were in peril.

How could the President misread the national mood so badly? National health insurance? Now? Where the hell did that come from?

The 1993 track record of earlier efforts, headed by Hillary Clinton and her buffoon of a consultant, Ira Magaziner, had run aground, failed miserably, and stirred up considerable animosity.

Obama was going to lead with this again? Bring on a storm of contentious clashes in the Congress, the press, and the nation at large?

What was he thinking?

He wasn’t. A super-ambitious campaign on this issue had to come from somewhere else. Obama’s high-flying humanitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, the man was acting as an agent of change. An agent.

He was taking dictation.

And sure enough, he sank the country in a hostile grinding debate that persists to this day. Meanwhile, the economy and jobs went begging.

When the Obamacare bill finally passed, without anyone reading it, and when subsequent arm-twisting led the Supreme Court to call the individual mandate a tax (a transparently preposterous strategy), thus clearing the way for implementation, amid loud cries of fraud, there remained another opportunity for promoting disaster:

A system for enrollment that wouldn’t work, that would crash, that would look like a bevy of drunken idiots ($634 million richer) had put it together with scotch tape and a random number generator.

At a much high level of op, Obamacare was always invented chaos.

It was intended to be.

The target was America itself. As in destabilization.

This is a strategy as old as the hills.

In this case, the people in charge, behind the scenes, are Globalists (think Rockefeller, for starters). For over a hundred years, their objective has been the takedown of the United States, one of the strongest holdouts against a planetary management system, in which, ultimately, national borders are erased and individual countries cease to exist.

In 1971, David Rockefeller’s intellectual consigliere, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “…[the] nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”

Achieving such a goal, however, is not simply a matter of standing back and watching evolution take it course. It involves torpedoing major institutions, regardless of how well or poorly they are serving the public interest.

In other words: promote chaos at every possible opportunity.

The extreme oddness of choosing national health insurance as the first planned shot out of the White House, in 2009, was, at the most important level, an exercise in stirring the national pot with a multi-blade fan engine.

Chaos has several aims; among them: raising the level of frustration; dividing the populace; engendering heating conflicts; demoralizing citizens; producing a sense of helplessness; and rendering large numbers of people into a state of surrender and passivity.

It is a prelude to a New Order. A more heartless and repressive Order.

Obamacare is just one example among hundreds.

Operation Chaos has been targeting the United States for well over a hundred years.

Of the dozen or so possible first steps of a Presidency, Obama chose the one that would produce the most discord.

Because US presidents rarely mention Globalism and its tentacles and plans and organizations, it is assumed the issue isn’t of high importance.

But since the closing days of World War 2, (and, actually, much earlier), when members of the Rockefeller Council on Foreign Relations were tapped to write the blueprint for the United Nations, when the outline of the Marshall Plan was drafted, when the first serious meetings of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) were set in stone, every American President has looked the other way, when Globalism has reared its head.

That’s FDR all the way through to Obama.

And during that 70-year period, ops small, medium, and large have been launched to weaken the United States and entangle it in the Globalist framework.

For the two terms of Obama’s Presidency, national health insurance was chosen as a bare electric wire, to shock, stimulate, and magnify dormant hostilities throughout the country.

To the Globalists, the respective merits and flaws in a national healthcare system are of absolutely no concern. It is simply one more opportunity to “crash the system” and produce a hole in the fabric of national life.

For these men, the issue of Obamacare “has legs.” They will squeeze more out of it, for their own purposes, in the months and years ahead.

Mired in the quite serious and real pros and cons of a national health plan, people will miss the bigger picture and pass by it without a glance of recognition.

The manipulators don’t pick trivial issues. Distraction requires presenting people with forceful conflicts.

It requires the belief that events are what they seem and the motives behind them are clear and on the surface.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

There are flaws in their thinking one of which is there are still approximately 100 Million Owners of Firearms who own approximately 300 Million Firearms.

And I believe that instead of getting what they want, they will Reap the Whirlwind.

If only 3% of Gun Owners fight against this Abomination the Obama Administration will indeed Reap the Whirlwind and Obama and his Puppet Masters his Minions and others who support him including the Ignorant and Brain Dead who voted for him will fully deserve what happens to them.

None of them are deserving of any, not one slightest bit of Compassion or Mercy and they must not, and will not, receive any.

Low Healthcare Enrollment May Indicate ObamaCare in Trouble


Raven Clabough
New American
October 18, 2013

With just over 50,000 people completing ObamaCare applications in the first week of the law’s implementation, it could be in danger. According to sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services, just 6,200 Americans applied for health insurance through the government website on October 1, the day it was opened to the public, and less than one percent of all visitors to Healthcare.gov actually enrolled in a health insurance exchange.

Ninety-nine percent of all visitors to HealthCare.gov left the site before enrolling.

Millward Brown Digital, a company that tracks web traffic, provided figures from the first week of online Obamacare health insurance exchanges.

“Over the course of Obamacare’s first week, 9.5 million people visited healthcare.gov, the federal government’s official healthcare website and the de facto exchange for residents of two thirds of the states,” wrote Matt Pace at the company’s blog. “In addition, the 16 operational state-run exchanges combined to attract over 3.1 million visitors during the same period.”

“In total, 11.3 million consumers visited the federal and state exchanges during their first week of operation,” he explained. “Unfortunately, what started as a fire hose of interest, resulted in only a small trickle of actual healthcare enrollments.”

Pace added that just slightly over 200,000 people who visited the site were able to register an account, but the overall figures remain bleak. “In the end, just 36,000 consumers, or 1% of all those who attempted to register for the federal exchange, successfully enrolled in Obamacare,” wrote Pace, noting that website wasn’t ready for the traffic it received, which he equated to the “daily traffic on Target.com.”

Furthermore, based on the figures from the first week, National Review’s Jim Geraghty estimates that ObamaCare will have approximately 820,000 enrollments by the time open enrollment ends on March 31, 2014. By comparison, the administration had hoped to acquire 494,000 enrollments by the end of October.

Geraghty puts those figures into perspective.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “Over 47 million nonelderly Americans were uninsured in 2012.” So the exchanges are on pace to get 1.7 percent of the uninsured with completed enrollment for insurance.

Officials in the administration purported to not be aware of the actual figures, likely hoping to sidestep questions about the implications of low enrollment. The Health and Human Services Department has announced that it will not release any enrollment data until next month, perhaps in the hope that by then the figures will appear less paltry.

But the Wall Street Journal contended that any indications from the administration that they do not have figures is false.

The states running their own exchanges report enrollment more regularly, which ranges from the low thousands in big states like California to a single person so far in Delaware. Literally, one. And the HHS-run exchanges are designed to make daily reports, seven days a week.

And some continued to assert that despite the poor figures, ObamaCare is popular. Justin Nisly, spokesman for Enroll America, an organization that aids Americans in signing up for ObamaCare, insisted that people have been “enthusiastic” and “grateful” for the healthcare law.

Others also tried to put a positive spin in the data. “HealthCare.gov received 14.6 million unique visits in the first 11 days, showing intense demand for quality, affordable health insurance,” insisted HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters, whose department operates HealthCare.gov. “While traffic is down somewhat from its peak on Day One, it remains high as Americans continue to seek to learn more about their new coverage options.”

Without a significant increase in the number of enrollments, ObamaCare may undergo what insurance experts dub a “death spiral,” driving insurance rates up for those who have coverage on the health insurance market — a phenomenon recently referenced by the Economist:

Obamacare’s main goal is to expand access to cheap insurance. It offers subsidies to those who cannot afford it and bars insurers from charging people more because they are sick. The sick who lack insurance will probably keep trying to enroll. The young and healthy may give up more quickly, if it is too difficult.

And if they do, the insurance firms that offer policies via the exchanges will find that their pool of customers is disproportionately sick and costly to cover. This may spur them to raise prices for everyone, making the young and healthy even less likely to enroll, despite the small fines they would have to pay if they lack insurance.

A death spiral could follow.

Some analysts assert that the poor enrollment is a result of coding and design problems connected to the website. Additionally, UnitedLiberty.org contends that the “decision to put income verification at the start of the enrollment process, thus allowing potential enrollees to see subsidy eligibilty so they wouldn’t be scared off by rate shock” was another reason the exchange site experienced issues.

Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady, chair of the House Ways & Means Health Subcommittee, observed, “If the numbers are accurate, they show that relatively few people have navigated the challenges of the first step of the process — roughly the population of a small town in my district.”

“The White House and HHS have continually claimed they did not have these figures,” Brady told the U.K.’s Daily Mail. “If they do, they have misled the Congress and the American people.”

And the Daily Mail asserted, “The low numbers also reflect a level of technological frustration on the part of Americans whose attempts to investigate their new health insurance options have been met with crashes, error messages and interminable delays.”

The failed ObamaCare website should raise questions considering its cost: “HealthCare.gov is an unmitigated, $400-million disaster,” declared Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.). He continued,

Deadlines have been repeatedly missed. The databases that store sensitive medical and financial information aren’t secure. Those attempting to enroll in health care exchanges have been unable to do so due to technical “glitches.” Worse still, these same individuals will be slapped with a penalty tax for being uninsured. If the federal government is unable to manage this website, how can they possibly manage our country’s health care system?

The site was designed to serve as many as 50,000 people per hour, a figure that is now being heavily criticized as it fails to address the needs of the 50 million uninsured people in the country, with an additional 15 million who are currently buying insurance on the individual market and will have to change.

But low enrollment could very well be an indicator of something more.

The Daily Mail reported, “The anemic totals suggest a far lower level of interest in coverage through the Affordable Care Act than the Obama administration has hoped to see.”

This could spell trouble for the administration. CNBC writes,

In order to keep prices on those plans affordable, Obamacare proponents are pushing to get 7 million or so people enrolled by 2014, and in particular are hoping to get nearly 3 million young adults to enroll. Those younger people are seen as crucial, because their premiums will help offset the costs of benefits paid out to older enrollees, who as a group have more health problems.

I have heard that the standard "punishment" on this is to just confiscate people's tax returns and then hand the money over to the health care "system". How much you want to bet not a single clinic or hospital will be constructed or refurbished with the money, but lots and lots of government upper middle class wage positions will be created and paid. More desk jockeys and still fewer actual qualified medical care providers.

Then as the public demands actual medical care providers, they will be outsourced to third world education systems. More Cuban, Chinese, African and Indian doctors, while Americans get employed only on the basis of what "the system" thinks of them, not actual merit or qualifications.

Health insurance premiums will soar in 45 states under ObamaCare. So much for that "Affordable" Care Act.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Perhaps it is just a matter of definition.
Perhaps when he made this assessment he was under the opinion that the Average American Family was on Welfare, Food Stamps, and thus the $2500 that was being held from their welfare checks each month for Medicaid would not happen anymore under the "Affordable Health-care Tax" program.
He also assumed that since all of the politicians have opted out, the Federal Judicial Branch and their employees had opted out, The Executive Branch and all agencies had opted out. The entire Muslim and Jewish religious groups had opted out.
Then who would be left? Why those right wing, Tea party attending, Terrorists! They don't count anyway.
Let them pay!

Here's your ironic story of the day . Sue Kinkhamer, an ardent Democrat, used to work for Rep. Bill Foster, until he lost his seat in Congress partly because of ObamaCare. But still, despite losing her job, Sue Kinkhamer defended ObamaCare.

After she lost her job, she had to buy her own health insurance. Last month, her insurance was $291 a month, with a $3,500 deductible.

Then she got a letter from Blue Cross.

Hey, what part of "Screw you" don't you understand?

Onward and upward,
airforce

Hold on to your SHORT HAIRS men, $#it always rolls down hill, and men are at the bottom. Anyone who pays child support and or Alimony are about to be hit with crippling increases. And we thought we were getting SCREWED before ! I expect a TITLE WAVE of attacks on men, not going to be pretty ! Paid off my Child Support 4 years ago, Thank You Jesus !

Men, masculinity and all that goes with it have been under attack for a long time. Was a time when we would'nt know what a metro sexual was. We would call that being a queer. The male population has been emasculated and pansyfied. And guess who is responsible for that? Us!

Tell these bastards this. As long as I owe you. You'll never be broke. F off!

I think there is definitely a new wave of economic fear going on out there. Downtown Portland just had a water main break, causing parts of the city to have to go without water, and with people leaving on top of the normal rush hour traffic, and several streets being closed off, with no functional traffic management, things just turned into a nonstop traffic jam, nobody really knew what to do, especially the government.

Traffic was horrible downtown this afternoon due to a major water main breaking which apparently served a pretty big chunk of the city (Portland Oregon). Turning rush hour traffic into a clusterfuck of absolutely monumental proportions. After around 45 minutes to just go a few blocks, I was beyond frustrated, decided to pull over in a clear parking spot, which just happened to be at a stripper club I had not been inside of for at least a year. Kind of a high end place normally a wee bit above my league but if I stayed in that traffic, well, it might have turned violent.

Absolutely gorgeous chicks, the type who normally are nice and all, but not exactly all over me. What I got for less than $20 total in ones, was 45 minutes of the equivalent of back to back lapdances from a half dozen absolute hotties who were bored and and had nothing else to do.

Gotta love it when SHTF...

You know, the FedGov tried to sell ass once.
The IRS had seized a brothel due to non-payment of taxes. Seems part of the deal is that the IRS must run any business it seizes to try to recoup as much of the owed taxes it can.

Within six months, the brothel went bankrupt.

If the FedGov cannot sell ass, which is about as self-selling as it gets, what makes them think they can sell insurance?

This was never anything more than another way to finish cleaning out America's bank accounts.

Unions refusing to help ObamaCare enrollment. The AFL-CIO can usually be counted on as cheerleaders for President Obama. But when it comes to ObamaCare, not so much.

Onward and upward,
airforce