Category Archives: Obamacare

Obama, the Conductor of Chaos

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Barack Obama holds the baton to an anti-American orchestra of tuned, tested, rehearsed instruments. The production is mismanaged, sour to the ears and causes people to leave the arena when the verses are not American and in cadence with allies. The entire governmental score is tyrannical and abusive.

His performance however, is well driven by inside marxist, communists and socialist operators who themselves have tuned, tested and rehearsed instruments where it is in harmony with enemies of America. How about Hugo Chavez, Mohammed Morsi or the Taliban? Then there is Iran.

Three branches of government have been reduced to one, where Conductor Obama has ruled with a pen and a phone and otherwise political extortion. Up to the point where Senate majority leader, Harry Reid lost his leadership post, he functionally stopped and paralyzed the people’s work on Congress to protect Barack Obama.

All the while, Maestro Obama had his was working his intonations on the Supreme Court with his choice picks of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, swinging the black robe influence to a more left octave. The court is broken when one sees the real dissention between the justices when not on the bench.

Obama has led an opus where the very social and civil structure in America has been thrown into turmoil. Border Patrol has no clue how to enforce immigration laws, they abide to DHS memos written by Secretary Jeh Johnson. Historical flags and icons are to be removed and gender designated bathrooms are now without any designation.

The fundamental security of government personnel and documents of several agencies has been compromised by an epic cyber intrusion and that finale is from over as the damage will be ongoing for years.

The very personal concern of having access to healthcare has reached a crisis pitch such that insurance deductibles are financially bending and having a doctor’s appointment is a future dream. Nothing is more demonstrative of this condition than that of the Veteran’s Administration where there is a slow death waltz.

Barack Obama performed a medley of government fraud and extortion using the IRS, the EPA, the DoJ, ATF, Education, HUD and HHS to name a few.

Off our shores, conditions are much worse. Barack Obama has modulated a score of retreat while his measure of sympathy to Islam in pure nocturne. His administration led of early in 2009 with the Cairo speech where the ligature plays out today throughout the Muslim world. The retreat from Iraq and his shallow threat of a ‘red-line’ have prove deadly in the whole region, a modern day holocaust. And mostly sadly of all was allowing 4 Americans to perish in Libya with no hope of security, support or rescue.

The most grave of the Obama coda is the terror and dying of Christians.

The building crescendo of Obama will be the nuclear agreement with Iran where Israel, Saudi Arabia, Europe and America as the great Satan will be his encore.

The stretto of the Obama symphony is defined here in an excellent summary by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard.

There are several months left for the conductor of chaos to work his baton and that tremolo is clearly upon us and the world.

 

 

 

 

 

Sunlight Exposing the Cockroaches like Gruber

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‘When Gruber was called before Congress to explain his remarks and his role in the health care law this past year, Gruber claimed he was not really an architect and that he wasn’t “an expert on politics and my tone implied that I was.”‘

From Forbes:

Gruber, the Obamacare architect

Gruber was no independent expert. The Obama administration paid him nearly $400,000 as a consultant on Obamacare’s design, especially its new layer of federal health insurance regulation. But Gruber tried to avoid disclosing this conflict in his public commentary and appearances. Democratic officials did as well, in order to maintain the pose that Gruber’s opinions were non-partisan. Indeed, when Sen. Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.) specifically asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a list of all its paid consultants, Gruber’s name was mysteriously omitted.

From the Wall Street Journal: MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who claimed the authors of ObamaCare took advantage of what he called the “stupidity of the American voter,” played a much bigger role in the law’s drafting than previously acknowledged, according to a published report.

The Wall Street Journal, citing 20,000 pages of emails sent by Gruber between January 2009 and March 2010, reported Sunday that Gruber was frequently consulted by staffers and advisers for both the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about the Affordable Care Act. Among the topics that Gruber discusses in the emails are media interviews, consultations with lawmakers, and even how to publicly describe his role.

The emails were released as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of federal health insurance exchange subsidies.

The Journal reports that the officials Gruber contacted by e-mail included Peter Orszag, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president; and Ezekiel Emanuel, then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.

“His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R- Utah, chairman of the House oversight committee, told the Journal. “There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce.”

“As has been previously reported, Mr. Gruber was a widely used economic modeler for administrations and state governments run by both parties—both before and after the Affordable Care Act was passed,” HHS spokeswoman Meaghan Smith told the Journal in a statement. “These emails only echo old news.”

Gruber became the center of a political storm in November 2014, when a video surfaced of him taking part in a 2013 panel discussion about ObamaCare. At one point, Gruber said the Obama administration wrote the bill “in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

At the time of the controversy, President Obama referred to Gruber as “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” However, the Journal reports that Gruber’s emails appear to reference at least one meeting with Obama. Furthermore, one email from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama health adviser, thanks Gruber for “being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment”, while another message from Lambrew refers to Gruber as “our hero.”

Fox News previously reported that HHS retained Gruber in March 2009 on a $95,000 contract to produce “a series of technical memoranda on the estimated changes in health insurance coverage and associated costs and impacts to the government under alternative specifications of health system reform.” A second contract with HHS three months later saw Gruber receive an additional $297,600.

Gruber later apologized for his comments in a December 2014 hearing before the House Oversight Committee, calling the remarks “mean and insulting.”

Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children

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Some studies speak for themselves. This one is chilling. It demonstrates failure, lack of control and management as well as a continued monetary magnet that wont soon or ever go away.

 

A Look at Cash, Medicaid, Housing, and Food Programs

by: The Center for Immigration Studies

Thirteen years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work. The major welfare programs examined in this report include cash assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, and public and subsidized housing.

Among the findings:

  • In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.
  • Immigrant households’ use of welfare tends to be much higher than natives for food assistance programs and Medicaid. Their use of cash and housing programs tends to be similar to native households.
  • A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households with children is received on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. But even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants (no U.S.-born children) still had a welfare use rate of 56 percent in 2009.
  • Immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, even before the current recession. In 2001, 50 percent of all immigrant households with children used at least one welfare program, compared to 32 percent for natives.
  • Households with children with the highest welfare use rates are those headed by immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent), and Ecuador (70 percent). Those with the lowest use rates are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).
  • The states where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62 percent); Texas, California, and New York (61 percent); Pennsylvania (59 percent); Minnesota and Oregon (56 percent); and Colorado (55 percent).
  • We estimate that 52 percent of households with children headed by legal immigrants used at least one welfare program in 2009, compared to 71 percent for illegal immigrant households with children. Illegal immigrants generally receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children.
  • Illegal immigrant households with children primarily use food assistance and Medicaid, making almost no use of cash or housing assistance. In contrast, legal immigrant households tend to have relatively high use rates for every type of program.
  • High welfare use by immigrant-headed households with children is partly explained by the low education level of many immigrants. Of households headed by an immigrant who has not graduated high school, 80 percent access the welfare system, compared to 25 percent for those headed by an immigrant who has at least a bachelor’s degree.
  • An unwillingness to work is not the reason immigrant welfare use is high. The vast majority (95 percent) of immigrant households with children had at least one worker in 2009. But their low education levels mean that more than half of these working immigrant households with children still accessed the welfare system during 2009.
  • If we exclude the primary refugee-sending countries, the share of immigrant households with children using at least one welfare program is still 57 percent.
  • Welfare use tends to be high for both new arrivals and established residents. In 2009, 60 percent of households with children headed by an immigrant who arrived in 2000 or later used at least one welfare program; for households headed by immigrants who arrived before 2000 it was 55 percent.
  • For all households (those with and without children), the use rates were 37 percent for households headed by immigrants and 22 percent for those headed by natives.
  • Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using some welfare for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates because most immigrants have been in the United States for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some states provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically awarded American citizenship and are therefore eligible for all welfare programs at birth.
  • The eight major welfare programs examined in this report are SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low income elderly and disabled), TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food program), free/reduced school lunch, food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies.

Introduction

Concern that immigrants may become a burden on society has been a long-standing issue in the United States. As far back as colonial times there were restrictions on the arrival of people who might become a burden on the community. This report analyzes survey data collected by the Census Bureau from 2002 to 2009 to examine use of welfare programs by immigrant and native households, particularly those with children. The Current Population Survey (CPS) asks respondents about their use of welfare programs in the year prior to the survey,1 so we are examining self-reported welfare use rates from 2001 to 2009. The findings show that more than half of immigrant-headed households with children use at least one major welfare program, compared to about one-third of native-headed households. The primary reason immigrant households with children tend to have higher overall rates is their much higher use of food assistance programs and Medicaid; use of cash assistance and housing programs tends to be very similar to native households.

Why Study Immigrant Welfare Use?

Use of welfare programs by immigrants is important for two primary reasons. First, it is one measure of their impact on American society. If immigrants have high use rates it could be an indication that they are creating a net fiscal burden for the country. Welfare programs comprise a significant share of federal, and even state, expenditures. Total costs for the programs examined in this study were $517 billion in fiscal year 2008.2 Moreover, those who receive welfare tend to pay little or no income tax. If use of welfare programs is considered a problem and if immigrant use of those programs is thought to be high, then it is an indication that immigration or immigrant policy needs to be a adjusted. Immigration policy is concerned with the number of immigrants allowed into the country and the selection criteria used for admission. It is also concerned with the level of resources devoted to controlling illegal immigration. Immigrant policy, on the other hand, is concerned with how we treat immigrants who are legally admitted to the country, such as welfare eligibility, citizenship requirements, and assimilation efforts.

The second reason to examine welfare use is that it can provide insight into how immigrants are doing in the United States. Accessing welfare programs can be seen as an indication that immigrants are having a difficult time in the United States. Or perhaps that some immigrants are assimilating into the welfare system. Thus, welfare use is both a good way of measuring immigration’s impact on American society and immigrants’ adaptation to life in the United States.

Read on if you dare by clicking here.

More Govt Fleecing in the Billions

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Not only is Obamacare as a law but with implementation and application a failure, but money associated with it, has become a financial Armageddon. Those who have recently had any medical experience with insurance and coverage have determined the affordability is way beyond what was told and sold to us. Now, add a double whammy to the problem, more taxpayer dollars lost.

Remember how much the cost of the Obamcare website cost to launch?

The website Digital Trends reported on Thursday that, based on government documents displaying contracts awarded to CGI Federal Inc., the Canadian-based company which in 2011 won a $93 million contract to build the federal healthcare exchange, the cost of HealthCare.gov was about at $634 million. Remember when the White House said and it is still on their website?

Q: Will my premiums / costs go up because of health reform?

A: No.

According to the independent and non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, people who get coverage through their employer today will likely see lower premiums.

Reform will lower premiums by reducing administrative costs, increasing competition between insurance companies and creating a larger pool of insured Americans.

And remember, the cost of doing nothing is high. In ten years, health care spending for each employee at an average big company will be $28,530. Then remember when the White House backtracked on the cost of Obamacare was going to go up? Check that here.

It just got much worse.

 

CMS’s internal controls (i.e., processes in place to prevent or detect any possible substantial errors) did not effectively ensure the accuracy of nearly $2.8 billion in aggregate financial assistance payments made to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act during the first 4 months that these payments were made.

 

Feds Can’t Verify $2.8 Billion in Obamacare Subsidies

Inspector General report is found here.

CMS does not know if subsidies went to ‘confirmed enrollees, in the correct amounts’

The federal government cannot verify nearly $3 billion in subsidies distributed through Obamacare, putting significant taxpayer funding “at risk,” according to a new audit report.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) released an audit Tuesday finding that the agency did not have an internal system to ensure that subsidies went to the right enrollees, or in the correct amounts.

“[The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] CMS’s internal controls did not effectively ensure the accuracy of nearly $2.8 billion in aggregate financial assistance payments made to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act during the first four months that these payments were made,” the OIG said.

“CMS’s system of internal controls could not ensure that CMS made correct financial assistance payments,” they said.

The OIG reviewed subsidies paid to insurance companies between January and April 2014. The audit found that CMS did not have a process to “prevent or detect any possible substantial errors” in subsidy payments.

The OIG said the agency did not have a system to “ensure that financial assistance payments were made on behalf of confirmed enrollees and in the correct amounts.”

In addition, CMS relied too heavily on data from health insurance companies and had no system for state-based exchanges to “submit enrollee eligibility data for financial assistance payments.”

The government does “not plan to perform a timely reconciliation” of the $2.8 billion in subsidies.

The audit was released as the country awaits a Supreme Court ruling that could make all federal subsidies invalid, since the majority of states did not set up their own health insurance exchange.

Eligible individuals enrolled in Obamacare can receive different types of subsidies, including advance premium tax credits (APTCs) and advance cost-sharing reductions (CSR), which can be used towards premiums or out-of-pocket health care costs.

According to the OIG, the government still does not have a complete system for approving subsidies distributed though Obamacare. CMS used an “interim process” to distribute subsidies for 2014, and is planning a “permanent process” to be finished by late 2015. The final system is supposed to approve enrollment and payment data “on an enrollee-by-enrollee basis.”

“Without effective internal controls for ensuring that advance CSR payments are reconciled in a timely manner, a significant amount of Federal funds are at risk,” the OIG said.

The report noted that multiple agencies within CMS oversee subsidy payments, including the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO), the Office of Financial Management (OFM), the Office of the Actuary (OACT), and the Office of Information Systems (OIS).

In response to the audit, CMS said they issued a regulation to change their accounting methods.“CMS takes the stewardship of tax dollars seriously and implemented a series of payment and process controls to assist in making manual financial assistance payments accurately to issuers,” they said.

 

Obamacare = O’boondoggle

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Everything has a consequence and there are many attached to Obamacare, many not in the mainstream knowledge base. Jobs and innovation in the United States is the latest victim of the law. The Supreme Court will decide the fate of the law under the King vs. Burwell case at the end of the month. A description of the case is found here. There are some key facts on the case that need to be known as noted here. Additional destructive consequences still loom in the future.

ObamaCare’s Anti-Innovation Effect

by Scott W. Atlas

Of the many unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the least noticed is its threat to innovation. Although most discussions center on the law’s more immediate effects on hiring, insurance rates and access to doctors and care, attention should also be paid to its impact on U.S. research and development and health-care technology.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s health-care innovation occurs in the U.S. This includes ground-breaking drug treatments, surgical procedures, medical devices, patents, diagnostics and much more. Most of the funding for that innovation—about 71% of U.S. R&D investment—comes from private industry. A recent R&D Magazine survey of industry leaders in 63 countries ranked the U.S. No. 1 in the world for health-care innovation.

But that environment is changing. According to R&D Magazine and the research firm Battelle, growth of R&D spending in the U.S. from 2012 to 2014 averaged just 2.1%, down from an average of 6% over the previous 15 years. In that same 15-year period, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, India and the European Union saw faster R&D spending growth than the U.S. China’s grew on average 22% per year.

The recent slowdown in R&D spending in the U.S. is in part caused by weak economic growth since the 2008 financial crisis. But the economy’s weakness itself has been exacerbated by the negative impact of new taxes and regulations under ObamaCare. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the new health-care law will levy more than $500 billion in new taxes over its first 10 years to help pay for insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion. These new taxes include significant levies on key health-care industries, such as manufacturers of medical devices and drugs, and their investors.

As a result, small and large U.S. health-care technology companies are moving R&D centers and jobs overseas. The CEO of one of the largest health-care companies in America recently told me that the device tax his company paid last year exceeded his company’s entire R&D budget. Already a long list of companies—including Boston Scientific , Stryker and Cook Medical—have announced job cuts and plans to open new centers for R&D, manufacturing and clinical trials overseas.

The bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration are also hindering medical-technology and drug development. According to a 2010 survey of more than 200 medical-device companies by medical professor and entrepreneur Josh Makower and his colleagues at Stanford University, delays of approvals for new medical devices are now far longer in the U.S. than in many other developed countries. In the European Union—not exactly known for cutting through red tape—it takes on average seven months to gain approval for low- to moderate-risk devices. In the U.S., FDA approval for similar devices takes on average 31 months.

The 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers Medical Technology Innovation Scorecard found that “the gap between innovation leaders and emerging economies is rapidly narrowing.” And that “although the United States will hold its lead, the country will continue to lose ground during the next decade.” It goes on to say that “China, India, and Brazil will experience the strongest gains during the next 10 years.”

Since the signing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, private-equity investment in new U.S. health-care startups has also diminished. Annual capital investment has decreased to $41 billion in 2013 from $61 billion in 2011, according to quarterly reports by the accounting and audit firm McGladrey LLP. Similarly, the Silicon Valley-based law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati reported in its semiannual Life Sciences Reports decreases from the first half of 2010 through the second half of 2013 in deal closings and capital raised for startups in biopharmaceuticals, medical devices and equipment, and diagnostics, with only a slight uptick in health-information systems investment.

Meanwhile, many of the best and brightest who come to the U.S. to study science, technology, engineering and math—the STEM subjects that are so crucial to innovation—are choosing to return to their home countries upon graduation. In 2008, a survey conducted by Vivek Wadhwa and his team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and the University of California found that only 6% of Indian, 10% of Chinese and 15% of European students expected to make America their permanent home. Much of this is Congress’s fault. Lawmakers have been slow to increase limits on H-1B visas for high-skill foreign workers. Pressure has been brought to bear on Congress to take action, but it may be too late for an increase in the visas to have much effect in health care, given the decline in R&D spending that would make use of their talents.

What can be done to reverse these damaging trends? First, strip back the heavy tax burdens that currently inhibit innovation, starting with repealing the Affordable Care Act’s $29 billion medical-device excise tax and the $80 billion tax on brand-name drugs. Change the tax code to add incentives for investment in early-stage medical technology and life-science companies, as well as for philanthropic gifts to academic institutions that promote tech entrepreneurs.

And finally, simplify processes for new device and drug approvals, so that the FDA becomes a favorable rather than an obstructionist environment for these life-saving and cost-saving discoveries. It’s a tall order, especially in today’s Washington. But America’s health—and wealth—depend on it.

*** Obama’s ‘King v. Burwell’ Speech Displayed The Very Ideological Fervor That Led Him To Break The Law

In a case called King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether it agrees with two lower courts that President Obama is breaking the law by subjecting 57 million employers and individuals to illegal taxes, and spending the illegal proceeds to hide the cost of HealthCare.gov coverage from 6.5 million enrollees. Today the president delivered a speech designed to cow the Supremes into turning a blind eye to the law. Instead, he offered what for some is the missing piece of the King v. Burwell puzzle. He displayed the very ideological fervor that leads powerful people to break the rules.

“We have an obligation to put ourselves in our neighbor’s shoes, and to see the common humanity in each other,” the president said. Yet the president of the United States has an even more important obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”  It’s right there in Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which President Obama swore to uphold. King v. Burwell is about his failure to meet that obligation.