Complicated, Expensive, Unpopular and Failing Obamacare Needs To Be Repealed

Today in Washington, D.C. - March 7, 2014:
The Senate is not in session today and will reconvene on Monday at 4 PM, when it will take up another district judge nominee. At 5:30 PM, votes are scheduled on cloture on the nomination and on passage of S. 1917, a bill to curb sexual assaults in the military. Yesterday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-NY) bill to address military sexual assaults by removing the chain of command from the process (S. 1752) failed to get cloture by a vote of 55-45. Senators then voted 100-0 to invoke cloture on S. 1917, Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D-MO) alternative bill.

The House is not in session today and will reconvene on Monday at 2 PM.
Yesterday the House passed the following bills:
H.R. 2641 (229-179) — "To provide for improved coordination of agency actions in the preparation and adoption of environmental documents for permitting determinations, and for other purposes."
H.R. 3826 (229-183) — "To provide direction to the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency regarding the establishment of standards for emissions of any greenhouse gas from fossil fuel-fired electric utility generating units, and for other purposes."
H.R. 4152 (385-23) — "To provide for the costs of loan guarantees for Ukraine."

The Washington Post reports, “The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal, according to a pair of new surveys. Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look. The snapshots from the surveys released Thursday provide preliminary answers to what has been one of the biggest mysteries since HealthCare.gov and separate state marketplaces opened last fall: Are they attracting their prime audience? . . . The surveys offer no evidence that the rule changes contribute to the insurance marketplaces’ relatively low popularity among the nation’s uninsured. One of the surveys, by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., shows that among people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through one of the exchanges, the biggest factor is that they believe they cannot afford it. . . . With just over three weeks remaining in a six-month sign-up period, the question of how many uninsured people are gaining coverage is eluding both Obama administration officials and most of the private health plans being sold through the new marketplaces.”

National Journal explores that problem with Obamacare: “There's a lot we don't know about how Obamacare enrollment is going. Apparently that's also true even within the Obama administration. Gary Cohen, the soon-to-be-former director of the main implementation office at the Health and Human Services Department, stopped by an insurance industry conference Thursday to offer an update on enrollment. . . . But Cohen didn't have much more to offer insurers — who need this to work just as much as the White House—on some of the biggest unknowns about the law's progress: How many uninsured people are signing up? ‘That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way,’ Cohen told the insurance-industry crowd on Thursday when asked how many of the roughly 4 million enrollees were previously uninsured. . . . How many people signed up directly with insurers? When HealthCare.gov was broken in October and November, HHS and insurers agreed on ‘direct enrollment’ as a workaround—encouraging people to sign up directly with insurance companies. . . . Cohen was asked Thursday how many people have signed up outside the exchanges. ‘I don't think we have done anything to try to collect that sort of data,’ he said.”

In other words, Democrats embarked on this massive overhaul of one-sixth of the economy, Americans were told, to insure the uninsured, to lower costs, and to lower premiums. But Obamacare is failing at all of these things. As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said last month, “Obamacare is just not working the way the Administration promised. It’s hurting the middle class, it’s eliminating incentives to work in the middle of a jobs crisis. . . . And for all of the disruption and pain, it’s a law that will still leave 31 million Americans uninsured at the end of the day. That’s why it’s not surprising when we hear that nearly 90 percent – 9 out of 10 – of the new enrollees in Obamacare exchange plans are actually folks who were already insured. Many of them simply shifting from plans they liked to more-expensive plans the government thinks they should like. Which leads so many Americans to ask: What was the point of Obamacare?”

It boggles the mind even further to hear the person in charge of implementing Obamacare at HHS say when asked about the key statistic of how many uninsured people are getting coverage, ostensibly the whole point of health care reform, “That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.”

Obamacare is an incredible train wreck that isn’t doing any of the things Democrats promised it would do, and as it continues to break explicit promises they made, they keep looking to President Obama to unilaterally delay pieces of it out of political expediency.

Writing in USA Today on the latest example, Leader McConnell said, “It's essentially all smoke and mirrors, because as long as Obamacare remains law, Americans will continue to face the threat of losing their plans. It's simply how the law was written; there's no ‘glitch’ to be ironed out. And what makes this latest delay so troubling is the fact that it seems to have been prompted not by the heartbreaking stories of millions of Americans but by the private pleadings of a handful of endangered Washington Democrats. And so, the same people who said Obamacare shouldn't be changed before are now begging the president to do it unilaterally to solve their own immediate political problems.”

This complicated, expensive, unpopular, and failing law needs to be repealed!

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