• The White House and Kathleen Sebelius promise that the HealthCare.gov website will be completely functional by 30 November. Meanwhile, the site continues to crash and when it's available, people cannot complete their applications for coverage and submit them. In fact, HealthCare.gov was unavailable during Secretary Sebelius' testimony to the House on Wednesday the 30th, at the same time she assured the Representatives that it was working.
• During her testimony, Secretary Sebelius also refused to provide an estimate for the number of Americans who have actually purchased health insurance through HealthCare.gov, promising that the administration would publish that estimate by 15 November. Her refusal was consistent with administration policy since White House spokesman Jay Carney and Priest-King himself decline to provide that information, likely because it is an embarrassingly low number.
• FoxNews reports that the major private health insurance companies in the United States are being intimidated by the administration into remaining silent on the entire Obamacare issue, also likely to prevent embarrassment for the President's signature legislative achievement.
• Appeals from a growing number of Democrat politicians notwithstanding, Priest-King refuses to grant a waiver for the individual mandate for any length of time, understanding of course that he has no legal authority to delay or alter any part of the law.
• Those states that are operating their own health care exchanges refuse to publish ratings for the various health care plans that would help citizens make more informed choices about the coverage they buy. The information is readily available but the refusal to provide such ratings seems intended to lure citizens into buying more expensive plans unwittingly.
• As of 29 October, about 1.5 million people have had their individual health insurance policies cancelled. One woman's monthly premium rose from $54 to $557, others have seen their premiums rise 800% with deductibles of $24,000, clearly unaffordable for the average American. This evidence directly contravenes Priest-King's repeated assurances that nobody who preferred their existing health coverage would lose it and that the average American would save $2500 under Obamacare.
The issues with the HealthCare.gov website are bad enough but eventually they will be solved - the administration will spend whatever they have to spend, hire whomever they have to hire and even blow it up and start over if necessary but the technical problems will be fixed. The website is merely the symptom of the law it implements, however, so if premiums and deductibles climb to stratospheric levels and millions of people lose their insurance and people are being herded blindly into health plans they cannot possibly afford and buying coverage they don't need, then the law is working as intended. Obamacare was designed to drive private health insurance providers out of business, forcing their customers into a single government-run construct where they would be trapped forever in a hopelessly wasteful, corrupt, unfair, unjust, complicated, socialist true believer's wet dream of a health care system, so the disintegration ofthe private health insurance market is expected. Imagine! Every American enrolled in Obamacare whether they like it or not, charged whatever premiums the government sees fit to charge, resources shifted from the healthy and the young and the industrious to the sick and the old and the indigent, everyone receiving the same mediocre level of care as slowly and inefficiently as a disinterested government can provide it: Rapture!
This end state - the elimination of the private health insurance market in favor of a massive government program - has been a goal of the Left in this country for decades. John Dingell advocated for the cause as early as the 1950's, Ted Kennedy (bang the drum slowly) championed it in the 1970's and of course, more recently, Priest-King himself predicted and embraced a single-payer system at a meeting of the Service Employees International Union in San Francisco in 2003. To the Left, the only way to ensure that everyone in America receives a nominal level of health care is to eliminate every other possibility and channel everyone (and their resources) into a government system that distributes those resources more fairly, from a healthy, middle-aged and prosperous businessman at the height of his earning potential to an 85 year-old illegal immigrant with tuberculosis and emphysema, for example. Government-controlled health care is an indispensable component of the socialist society that Priest-King envisions and is such a lofty goal and moral imperative that any means are justified in achieving it - requiring the aforesaid businessman to purchase prenatal coverage is one example and Priest-King repeatedly and deliberately lying to the American people is another. (We know, courtesy of NBC News, that the IRS briefed Priest-King in July 2010 that as many as two-thirds of those Americans who buy their own health insurance would lose their coverage as a result of Obamacare, amounting to some 16 million people, yet he continued to assure the country that "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period.") And make no mistake: As millions of people lose their insurance and choose to pay an annual fine rather than pay exorbitant premiums, Priest-King will resort to any means to ensure Obamacare's survival. The IRS will become the henchmen of the Sheriff of Nottingham, garnishing wages, condemning property, seizing tax refunds, confiscating retirement funds and savings accounts, grabbing America by the throat and choking every possible penny out of the unrepentant scofflaws because by God, America will be bent to Priest-King's will and nothing is going to stop him.
And what happens when the (illegally granted) waiver for the business mandate expires in September? Businesses across the country have already been cutting hours and staff to compensate for the extra burden imposed by Obamacare and when faced with certain doom, they will pink-slip their employees in the millions and muddle through as best they can. When Priest-King dictates mandatory minimum standards of coverage for each person whether they need something or not, driving up costs, what are private insurers to do but pass those costs on to their customers, and what are the customers to do but shed workers as fast as they can? The same IRS document obtained by NBC News indicates that as many as 93 million people will lose their employer-provided health insurance as a consequence of Obamacare yet Priest-King presses the accelerator to the floor, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. The entire health care system in the United States could collapse and it will be absolutely unnecessary. This is the new paradigm, America, and if you were stupid enough to vote for Priest-King once or even twice and you thought you would sail through a radical Leftist administration untouched, then you're not only a fool but a damned fool, but look at the bright side: You've got plenty of company.
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