I had an entire set of stuff lined up for yesterday’s LinkSwarm, but in the rush of amnesty-related news I managed to forget to paste it into the right file. D’oh!
So enjoy your rare complimentary Weekend LinkSwarm!
Archive for the ‘ObamaCare’ Category
LinkSwarm for November 22, 2014
Saturday, November 22nd, 2014LinkSwarm for November 21, 2014
Friday, November 21st, 2014Here in Austin, we’re enjoying a temporary respite from Winter in November, but I don’t expect it to last long.
Links!
The growing impression that politicians don’t play straight with their constituents is completely toxic, particularly to Democrats, who actually want to use government to improve people’s lives. It’s one thing to downplay unpalatable choices made in the law; it’s another to never disclose the consequences of legislation until it’s too late for anyone to react. Combine that with the moustache-twirling of a Jonathan Gruber, saying that the idiots should be happy for what they got, and you have basically every conservative stereotype about liberal elites confirmed.
Also: ObamaCare is designed for people buying insurance through it to get a nasty sticker shock in year two. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Democratic Failure In Texas: Even Worse Than You Thought
Wednesday, November 19th, 2014I wanted to put up a link to this Wayne Thorburn Politico Piece on the Democratic Party’s 2014 failure in Texas. The piece focuses on the many missteps made by Battleground Texas, such as the decision to send out-of-state Obama activists rather than hire within, the decision to go all-in on Wendy Davis rather than build an organization from the bottom up, and failure to share information with the Texas Democratic Party.
But the part I found most striking was the description of just how badly Democrats did in lower-level races:
This lack of a bottom-up strategy was particularly glaring on Dec. 9, 2013, the filing deadline for 2014 candidates. Far from attracting a number of qualified and vigorous candidates to the Democratic banner, Battleground and the party ended up ceding much of the field to the Republicans without even a whimper. In fact, Democrats failed to recruit anyone to run on their ticket for more than 40 percent of all state legislative positions on the ballot. The end result would be almost a two-to-one Republican majority in both the Texas Senate and the House. Even more depressing was the party’s showing at the county level. Democrats could not find anyone willing to run for County Judge (chief elected official in the county) in 165 of Texas’ 254 counties, ceding almost two-thirds of all counties to the Republicans without an election. Thus, by 2015, while the Democrats will retain the county judge in four of the six largest counties, the GOP will hold all 29 suburban county judge positions, 18 of 21 in the other metropolitan counties scattered around the state, and 150 of the 198 small town county courthouses. Of all the major counties in Texas, only Dallas, Bexar, El Paso, Jefferson and Travis, along with the border counties of Webb and Hidalgo, will have a Democratic county judge.
And even more depressing than that was the fact that not a single Democratic candidate could be found who was willing to run for any county office in 86 counties—more than one-third of the total. These 86 included the heavily populated suburban counties of Denton, Johnson and Parker (outside Dallas-Fort Worth), Montgomery (suburban Houston) and Comal (north of San Antonio) as well as the other urban counties of Bell (Temple), Randall (Amarillo) and Grayson (Sherman). As the saying goes, you can’t win a game if you don’t field a team.
All About GruberGate in Two Minutes
Tuesday, November 18th, 2014Since some members of the MSM still seem mystified as to who this “obscure” Jonathan Gruber is, here’s a handy two-minute video primer:
Firedoglake On Gruber’s Central Involvement in ObamaCare from 2010
Tuesday, November 18th, 2014I’m not sure if you’re familiar with FireDogLake or not, the lefty blog run by Jane Hamsher. (Think of it as sort of Daily Kos, Jr., and you wouldn’t be far wrong.)
Well, you may not remember, but there was a time in 2010 when Firedoglake and other liberals were fighting against what would become ObamaCare on the grounds that it was a giant taxpayer subsidy for insurance companies (correct) and that it simply wasn’t liberal enough, falling short of their goal of fully socializing the entire American medical system (AKA “single player”).
So back then, Hamsher was deeply skeptical of how ObamaCare was constructed, and did an analysis of the role one Jonathan Gruber had in crafting and selling the law.
How deeply was Gruber involved? Up to his eyeballs:
Up until this point, most of the attention regarding the failure to disclose the connection between Jonathan Gruber and the White House has fallen on Gruber himself. Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.
The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.
Throughout the piece, Hamsher highlights the numerous times when the Democratic Party and their allies in the media purport to “analyze” the effects of ObamaCare on a wide variety of economic metrics, when in fact all the disparate “analyses” all points back to Gruber’s work.
And how’s this for a prophetic sentence?
Though Gruber’s analysis has been cited as support that insurance would be affordable, it appears that the individual mandate will impose a financial burden on middle class families that will leave them with no ability to make the co-pays necessary to use the insurance they are forced to buy.
While the Hamsher piece doesn’t uncover whether Gruber actual drafted specific language that made it’s way into ObamaCare, her piece does make clear that not only was Gruber used by the White House, congressional Democrats and the media to sell ObamaCare, he was the central figure in selling ObaamaCare’s “cost savings” to the public:
What was Gruber’s role in crafting the Senate bill? Nobody will say. Is he in effect grading his own work when he praises the bill? We don’t know. What we do know is that the White House engaged an expert who was quite likely to reach the conclusions he reached, because he’d been making similar claims for years. And they worked hard to promote his work as independent validation of their plan, when in fact he was an integral part of it.
In light of this, it’s rather amazing the degree of amnesia that’s swept Democrats and their MSM lackeys over Gruber’s central role in ObamaCare. Even more amazing is the fact they think the public will actually buy those denials. Then again, as Gruber himself noted, lack of transparency and deceiving those “stupid” voters was central part of Democrats’ ObamaCare plans from the beginning…
(Note: When I tried to pull up this piece yesterday, I got a persistent error, and wondered on Twitter why Firedoglake had memory holed the piece, and went and found an archive in the Wayback Machine. Well, either that was a transient error, or they thought better of memory holing it, as it is now back up. The Wayback Machine link is here just in case it disappears again…)
Midday Post-Election Roundup
Wednesday, November 5th, 2014A few quick post-election links:
And Now News of Another ObamaCare-Related Rate Hike: My Own
Monday, November 3rd, 2014I’ve been covering ObamaCare since before it was even passed. Along the way I’ve documented numerous ObamaCare-related insurance cancellations and rate hikes. But now I have a special insurance rate hike to report on: my own.
Yes, my monthly rate will be going up by $100, a hefty 27.33% hike.
Background: As a contractor, I currently pay for my own health insurance. I have a Humana HMO Platinum Plan for myself only, with a fairly low deductible and solid prescription drug coverage (I’m not on any truly budget-busting medication, but I am on one slightly pricey one that essentially makes the pricier plan more cost effective than the cheaper ones.) I bought my plan through the private insurance market and not the ObamaCare website. (And the children’s dental is on there only because it was a buck more and I didn’t want to go through the bother of the paperwork hoops necessary to get it taken off.)
It’s not that I’ve never seen an insurance hike before, but before ObamaCare I never experienced one so breathtaking. Judging from results, ObamaCare seems designed to fatten both the bottom lines of insurance companies and to force people on affordable plans that Democrats disapprove of onto Medicaid.
I think I may have gotten my hike notice early only because I’m on a private, non-employer plan. If you’re on an employer-covered plan, there’s a good chance your rate hikes will be coming down the pike after the election…
LinkSwarm for October 20, 2014
Monday, October 20th, 2014I was at a writer’s workshop this weekend, so it’s slow going getting back into the swing of things:
Ebola might seem scary, but you'll be okay as long as you follow the established protocols for protecting @BarackObama from criticism.
— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) October 17, 2014
A New Kronies Action Figure
Monday, October 13th, 2014Evidently I missed the new Kronies action figure when it dropped in September: