Category Archives: Republicans

Obamacare has fallen, and it can’t get up.

“It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.

“The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post.

“The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming. But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.” —Andrew Couts, We Paid Over $500 Million for the Obamacare Site And All We Got Was This Lousy 404

“The House Republicans’ fourth (and latest) offer asks for only two changes in Obamacare: First, eliminate the subsidy for members of Congress, which has outraged the public. And second, delay for a year making insurance mandatory for individuals. Let anyone enroll in Obamacare who wants to. But don’t penalize individuals for being uninsured in 2014 when the president has already postponed the penalty on big companies for not insuring workers.

“‘The Affordable Care Act is a law that passed the House, it passed the Senate, the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional … and it is settled,’” said Obama.

“Not so. The health program the president is imposing on us is not the Affordable Care Act. The president has dismembered and mangled it. Gone is the employer mandate, the cap on out of pocket expenses, income verification and over half the deadlines specified in the law. The President delayed or did away with these features, without asking Congress. Illegally. Then he added 1,472 waivers and connived a subsidy for members of Congress that no one else in American earning $174,000 a year could get. The Supreme Court has ruled twice that presidents cannot delay, amend, and repeal parts of laws.” —Betsy McCaughey, Obama’s Dangerous Claim to Executive Power

“By funding uncontroversial and broadly popular programs while not automatically funding everything else, the Republicans are trying to trick the government into setting priorities, building bipartisan coalitions, and engaging the public in how to spend their tax money. Obama seemed to think this was self-evidently foolish, which tells you much about what the president thinks of the taxpayers.

“Then the president added, almost as an afterthought: ‘And you know, we don’t get to select which programs we implement or not.’ Since Obama chooses which parts of which laws he wants to implement and enforce at will, as if Congress were a supercommittee brainstorming ideas rather than a coequal branch passing laws, I’m guessing he would explain that he is again being take too literally when he’s obviously just posturing.” —Seth Mandel, Obama Stumbles Despite Friendly Press

“[Obamacare] was presented as an act of charity, a plan to cover the uninsured. That was the issue as they presented it. But the actual goal of Obamacare’s socialist sponsors was a single payer system – government healthcare — which would put the state in control of the lives of every American, man, woman and child. That is the reason that none of the promises made about Obamacare was true, beginning with his campaign lie that Obamacare government health care was not a program he would support. Obamacare will not cover 30 million uninsured Americans, as Obama and the Democrats said it would; Obamacare will not lower costs, as they promised it would; Obamacare will deprive many Americans of their doctors and healthcare plans, as they assured everyone it would not; Obamacare is a new tax, as they swore it wouldn’t be. All these promises Obama and the Democrats made were false because they were only a camouflage for their real goal actual goal, which was universal control. …

“If you want to fight the left you have to fight fire with fire. That means first and foremost you have to hold them to account for hurting the people they are pretending to help. Whose opportunities are going to be wrecked by Obamacare? Health care taxes will go up for those who pay taxes – the middle class – while their incomes will go down. Already Obamacare is cutting the workweek to 30 hours. Whose pocket books do you think that is hitting?” —David Horowitz, The Threat We Face

“President Obama has made many promises about his signature health care plan, but one of the simplest was an assurance that it would lower national health care spending and save every family thousands of dollars.

“But now government actuaries have reached a different conclusion, finding that ObamaCare will actually increase health care spending by $621 billion over the next 10 years. …

“Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center says the actuaries ‘made it very clear in their projections that the health care law did not bend the cost curve down. It bent it up,’ he says, adding, ‘there will be increase in national health spending associated with the implementation of the health care law.'” —Jim Angle, Government Actuaries Say Obamacare Will Increase Health Care Spending

“I’ve worked on massive database projects in the private sector, and I suspect that Chung is correct.  We do know that some testing took place, which is why everyone involved in the project was sending up warning flares for months about its status. HHS and the White House might have rolled it out with full knowledge of its incompetence hoping that they could provide enough assistance to jolly people along, but I don’t think that was the case. The failure caught them flat-footed last Tuesday, and the failure of the weekend retooling effort seemed to do the same. It looks as though no one bothered to actually sit down and try to go from A to Z in the system themselves.

“By the way, in one such project in my experience, the company got rid of the program managers when the team didn’t deliver … after eight months. There isn’t a private-sector firm in the world that would have tolerated a web-portal project taking 42 months and delivering this kind of train wreck.” —Ed Morrissey, Did Anyone Bother to Test the Obamacare Software First?

“Canadian provincial health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obamacare health exchange websites, the Washington Examiner has learned.

“CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry. …

“Officials at the U.S. government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded six technology contracts worth $87 million to CGI Federal for Obamacare website work, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

“The CMS officials refused to say if federal officials knew of its parent company’s IT failure in Canada when awarding the six contracts.

“CGI Federal built Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov, which went live Oct. 1 but has since experienced multiple technical problems, including crashes, refusal to load and sign-on, or to provide accurate information.” —Richard Pollock, Canadian Officials Fired IT Firm Behind Troubled Obamacare Website

For further enlightenment:

Obama: “The United States Does Not Negotiate with Terrorists… Uh, Republicans”, by Bob Mack

The Obamacare Letdown, by John Hayward

Obamacare Has Raped My Future, by Ashley Dionne

A Surprising Health Insurance Option for Those Who Refuse Obamacare, by Merrill Matthews

Obamacare’s Next Big Problem: High Deductibles, High Copays, by Jim Geraghty

CBS Calls Obamacare Launch Nothing Short of Disastrous (video)

Wolf Blitzer: Obama Should Accept GOP Recommendation to Delay Obamacare (video)

John Stossel: The Obamacare Regulation Overload (video)

Sheila Jackson Lee Suggests Martial Law to End Government Shutdown (video)