Barack "if-you-like-your-doctor-you-can-keep-him" Obama Lied

With the debt deal behind them, congressional Republicans now are focused on the budget and debt ceiling negotiations looming for November and December (tomorrow's blog) - and the GOP is also taking aim at Obamacare, especially the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and are turning up the pressure on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to resign over the fiasco. GOP leaders Representatives Darrell Issa, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, and Fred Upton, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Commission, and Senator Lamar Alexander, ranking member of the HELP Committee, have sent oversight letters to HHS and have vowed to investigate. GOP complaints include deadlines having been repeatedly missed, and non-secure databases that store sensitive medical and financial information. And, despite these major flaws, the GOP says that those who tried but could not enroll using the non-functional exchanges will be hit with a penalty tax for being uninsured. The bottom line question is : if the government is incompetent to manage the health care website, how can they possibly manage the health care system Obama and the Democrats have foisted on America? The White House is thus far standing by Sebelius, who apparently has no intention of resigning, according to The New York Times. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said : "The secretary does have the full confidence of the president." But for how long? Because so far, Sebelius has not fixed the website. A study by market research company Millward Brown Digital showed that traffic on the website has plummeted since October 1 and that few people have successfully enrolled. The number of visitors to healthcare.gov dropped from 9.5 million in the first week to 4.1 million in the second week, according to the firm. While 196,000 people began to enroll in the first week, only 36,000 finished the process. In the second week, 368,000 began enrollment and just 47,000 completed it. But the Washington Post reports that visits to the website dropped 88% in the first two weeks, that roughly 36,000 consumers successfully signed-up for a government-backed insurance plan after enrolling, and 99.6% of all visitors to the site did not enroll. Administration officials say the figures reported by the Post are inaccurate, but the Department of Health and Human Services, which operates the site, still refuses to release official enrollment figures. Questions are also mounting about the contractors, Virginia-based CGI Federal, who received hundreds of millions of dollars, significantly above the projected cost, to build the failed website. Reuters has reported that US officials warned that the technology behind Obamacare might not be ready for launch and the administration is paying a contractor tens of millions of dollars more than it had planned to fix the problems. Government documents shows that the contract to build the federal website tripled in potential total value to nearly $292 million as new money was assigned to the work beginning in April this year, according to Reuters, while federal and state officials were warning the administration that the technology behind the Obamacare exchanges was flawed. Robert Laszewski, a health care consultant who works for insurers, told Politico that the administration was aware of the problems well ahead of time, pointing to an oversight report by the Government Accountability Office in June that pointed to missed deadlines and timetable issues. "The GAO was being politically correct…it didn't come out and say this thing is going to crash and burn, but if you go back and read it, it's pretty obvious," he said. Obama's former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on MSNBC on Monday that the debut had been "excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services." After the problems are fixed, he added, "I hope they fire some people." But putting the finger pointing aside, there remains the question of what is next for the exchanges. "Can they put the genie back in the bottle on this one? I don't think they can," GOP Representative Michael Burgess, vice chairman of the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, told Politico."I think the problems are too pervasive and too widespread. I think it may need going back to square one and rewriting the code." ~~~~~ But, dear readers, bad as the website fiasco is, with time and money -and most importantly, the willingness of the Obama White House and the Department of Health and Human Services to follow the advice of IT experts - it can be fixed. What cannot be fixed is the cost of Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that Obamacare in its first decade Will cost double what the President promised. When President Obama was selling his health care legislation to Congress, he declared that “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” But with the law’s major provisions set to kick in next year, a new analysis by the CBO projects that the law will cost double that, or $1.8 trillion. Trillion with a T. As many critics of the health care law pointed out at the time, Obama's number was deceptive because it estimated spending from 2010 through 2019 even though the program’s major spending provisions weren’t scheduled to go into effect until 2014. Effectively, the original estimate measured the cost of six years of Obamacare instead of 10. The CBO’s trillion dollar projection accounts for fiscal years 2014-2023, the first full decade of Obamacare. But that’s not all. The CBO now expects the Medicaid expansion to cover an additional 13 million people by 2023 (up 1 million from its February estimate) and the new government-run insurance exchanges to cover 24 million (1 million fewer than previously projected). And the CBO estimates that under Obamacare, 7 million fewer people in the United States will have employment-based insurance by 2023. The Heritage Foundation has made an even bleaker estimate - Obamacare will collect $800 billion in new taxes between 2013 and 2023. Many of these taxes will be paid by large and small businesses, thus reducing the funds they have available to expand and create jobs. All of this in order to provide insurance for what is now estimated to be between 10 and 20 million people not now insured. And keep in mind that 7 million Americans who had health insurance before will no longer have it. Why? Because the cost for a family of four will increase by $650 to $1,000 per year. And if that family has an income above $88,000 per year, it will receive no subsidy. In addition, if that family looks for a less expensive insurance plan that it can afford, it will find that its choice of doctors and hospitals will be greatly reduced - because insurance companies are trying to provide the less expensive coverage to those who will be completely shut out otherwise. ~~~~~ So, the next time you hear Senator Ted Cruz say that Obamacare must be repealed, don't fall into the trap of believing Barack "If-you-like-your-plan-and-doctor-you-can-keep-them-for-no-extra-cost" Obama. Ted Cruz and the GOP are right. Obamacare is a catastrophe for Americans and it must be repealed.