Labor Report Released | Most Americans Want Obamacare Repealed or Scaled Back | Obamacare Problems Pile Up

Today in Washington, D.C. - Dec. 6, 2013: Congress not session today, although various committees are working. In an interview, the President commented that he could get more done if his party controlled all of government. What a scary thought. Also, today, President Obama and his family turned the lights on on the National Christmas tree.

The Department of Labor’s unemployment report for November 2013 was released today.  House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) responded to the report, "Today’s report includes positive signs that should discourage calls for more emergency government ‘stimulus.’ Instead, what our economy needs is more pro-growth solutions that get government out of the way. That’s why the House has passed dozens of jobs bills that would help small businesses hire, increase our energy production, rein in red tape, and protect all Americans from the fundamentally-flawed health care law. President Obama ought to take this opportunity Republicans have given him and call on his party’s leaders in the Senate to act on these proposals immediately."

Evan Feinberg, President of Generation Opportunity said, "The economy has been terrible for young people for five years now, and President Obama has responded by asking my generation to foot the bill for more government spending and pay more for healthcare coverage through Obamacare.  Thankfully young people know a bad deal when we see one and are overwhelmingly choosing to Opt Out of Obamacare, opposing generational theft. This disastrous healthcare law has finally caught up with the President and his approval rating among young people is collapsing alongside Obamacare itself."

Real data reflects continued problem for for Millennial, age 18-29:

• The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.844 million young adults that are not counted as “unemployed” by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.
• The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds, which adjusts for labor force participation by including those who have given up looking for work, is 15.9 percent (NSA). The (U-3) unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds is 10.0 percent (NSA).
• The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year old African-Americans is 24.4 percent (NSA); the (U-3) unemployment rate is 17.9 percent (NSA).
• The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year old Hispanics is 16.9 percent (NSA); the (U-3) unemployment rate is 10.9 percent (NSA).
• The effective (U-6) unemployment rate for 18-29 year old women is 13.8 percent (NSA); the (U-3) unemployment rate is 9.5 percent (NSA).

But who knows if the BLS data is accurate?  Recent revelations that previous data was in error, possibly manipulated for political purposes, and then later revised makes us wonder.  Just three days ago, on Dec. 3, House committee chairmen sent a letter to the Secretary of Labor requesting information relevant to their investigation into allegations that  unemployment numbers have been manipulated at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

Americans for Limited Government vice president of public policy and communications Rick Manning, a former Public Affairs Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Labor, today issued the following statement praising the action by these House committee chairmen: "The House Education and Workforce Committee and the Ways and Means Committee have taken a vital first step in getting answers from Labor Secretary Thomas Perez on news reports that monthly jobs data has been manipulated.

"The December 3 letter from Chairmen John Kline, Dave Camp, along with the three relevant subcommittee chairmen charged with overseeing the Labor and Commerce Departments demanded that Perez provide the Committees, 'a description of all instances in which the Census Bureau reported to BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) its data were found to be inaccurate.'

"In the context of ongoing legitimate concerns that the unemployment numbers have been willfully and deliberately manipulated, the Labor Department's report that the unemployment rate has dramatically declined to 7 percent is evidence that it is now time for Congress to end extended unemployment benefits and restore the normal 27 week eligibility period that existed prior to 2008.

"It is also clear that the Federal Reserve should immediately begin tapering the $85 billion a month in mortgage backed securities purchases as this data, and that previously reported, demonstrate that it is unnecessary. In fact it would be the height of irresponsibility for the Fed to continue on the reckless course of continuing the Quantitative Easing program at all."On Wednesday, Harvard's Institute for Politics released a new poll of 18-29 year olds:

• 59% of 18-29 year olds disapprove of President Obama's job performance, the highest approval rating recorded during his entire presidency
• The President's approval rating has dropped 11 points among this group since the last poll in April 2013
• Only 3 out of 10 young Americans (18-29) plan to enroll in the government exchanges.
• 57% of Millennials disapprove of Obamacare.
• Only 18% say Obamacare will improve their care.
• If a recall election were held today 52% of young Americans 18-24 would vote to recall President Obama.

As the calamity that is Obamacare continues to hurt the nation, a new Gallup poll finds that most Americans “want Congress to repeal or scale back the law.” According to Gallup, “Fifty-two percent favor scaling back (20%) or repealing (32%) the law, similar to the 50% from mid-October. . . . Overall, 37% of Americans want the law expanded or kept as is, while 52% want the law repealed or scaled back, roughly similar to the 40% who approve and 54% who disapprove in the latest update on overall attitudes toward the ACA.” Politico adds, “As the White House claims to have significantly improved the Obamacare exchange website after a bungled rollout, more than half of all Americans still want to see the Affordable Care Act slimmed down or gone entirely. Fifty-two percent of those polled in a new Gallup survey said they want the law scaled back or repealed, compared with 50 percent in October . The majority of that group wants to see the law gone, as 32 percent of those surveyed said it should be repealed altogether.”

Everywhere one looks in the news this week, there’s another story of problems with Obamacare or its struggling website. The AP writes, “People shopping for insurance on the federal marketplace may be informed they're eligible for Medicaid and that their information is being sent to state officials to sign them up. However, states aren't able enroll them because they're not receiving usable data from the Obama administration. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services wrote a memo to the 36 states using the federal website last week acknowledging the information wasn't being transferred automatically and saying another system was being developed to send it. . . . The problem with Medicaid coordination could affect tens of thousands of applicants and represents the latest issue to arise in the rollout of a website that's been plagued with long waits for users and other glitches. Some users who fill out applications on the federal site may believe that they're already being enrolled in Medicaid or that state officials will contact them, even though the agencies aren't receiving the information they need, said Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. The data transfer problem is occurring in the 36 states where the federal site is deployed, regardless of whether they chose to expand Medicaid. . . . Tony Keck, director of South Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services, said that so far his agency has been receiving garbled data that may include a name but no address or three digits from a social security number. ‘What they're sending us is essentially the same type of bad data they're sending the insurance companies, and we can't do anything with it,’ Keck said. ‘That's frustrating, because there's going to be a lot of people who think they're enrolled, especially now that they're doing all the marketing and phone calls and enrollment's increasing on the website as it's improved.’”

Politico reports, “Even in states where Obamacare enrollment is booming, insurance companies are running into significant behind-the-scenes technical glitches that could threaten Jan. 1 health coverage. Many of these 14 states and the District of Columbia have been eager to tout the success of their own exchanges compared with the bungled federal portal, but they now appear to be worrying about back-end problems similar to those afflicting HealthCare.gov. It’s a new twist in the unfolding saga of so-called 834 forms — industry jargon for the application files that insurers receive when someone signs up for coverage through an exchange. Insurers in Kentucky and New York, for example, say they’ve received flawed 834 enrollment forms from their local exchanges, though the extent of the errors is unclear. Washington state has already had to correct thousands of 834s with faulty information about federal tax credits. Several state exchanges waited until late last month to even start sending application data to insurers, meaning potential errors haven’t had much time to surface. . . . Until now, concerns about state-run exchanges focused mostly on the places with very public breakdowns in just getting people into their system. Oregon, for one, only recently claimed its first enrollees, while Colorado has faced major bottlenecks in its system. Hawaii recently replaced its exchange director following a series of tech woes, and Vermont is reportedly withholding funds from its lead contractor, CGI, which also built the biggest chunk of HealthCare.gov. As for California, its program has yet to process as many as 35,000 applications that were submitted by fax, Fox Business Network revealed Thursday afternoon. Yet problems with the back end of these 15 exchanges have received little attention. Not even the programs considered to be the nation’s best — including Kentucky’s Kynect and New York State of Health — seem immune. . . . The office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, an ardent Obamacare opponent, has been asking insurers if they’re getting the information they need to enroll people. “We have been told that although a Kentuckian may believe they’ve enrolled in a plan on the exchange, this information is not necessarily being reported to the insurer in a way that guarantees coverage,” said McConnell spokesman Donald Stewart.”

And another Politico piece ponders, “How will the White House make sure all those people with canceled policies get new coverage by Jan. 1? At the rate the signups are going — even with the speedier, newly functioning Obamacare website — the administration has a vast distance to travel before the estimated 4 to 5 million people with canceled policies get new health coverage. In fact, health care experts say, it’s not out of the question that the Obama administration could face the worst-case scenario on Jan. 1: the number of uninsured Americans actually goes up. . . . [E]ven with all the variables, one thing is for certain: the Obama administration has one seriously long road to travel from the signups it has now to the number who will likely need to replace their coverage. That’s a bad place to be, given that the point of the law was to cover more people, not fewer people.”

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