Obama’s ‘Administrative Fix’ Speech: There’s No One Left To Shaft

CGI's Lymerick: Obama’s ‘Administrative Fix’ Speech: There’s No One Left To Shaft

Posted By: CGI_admin [Send E-Mail]
Date: Friday, 15-Nov-2013 14:18:45

November 14, 2013 by Ben Bullard President Barack Obama’s Thursday switcheroo announcement that he (not Congress, which makes laws, but he himself, alone) would unilaterally cut people a break under Obamacare into 2014 ought to vindicate Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whom the mainstream media exiled to buffoon island after his stand against implementation of the Affordable Care Act last month. But media moves on. That won’t happen. Just about the only people or groups who by now haven’t been directly shafted by Obamacare, along with Obama’s new “administrative fix,” are those who’ve become eligible for Medicaid and, perhaps, supporters of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential ambitions. Congressional Democrats are panicking over how to spin their role in the Obamacare disaster with the 2014 midterm elections looming. Many Congressional Republicans are wondering how Obama is capable of saying, with a straight face, that he wants to do the same thing they attempted to do when they sent draft after draft of a bill delaying the Obamacare individual mandate – a bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the Congressional Obama contingent shut down the government in order to avoid passing. People who had individual coverage – five million of them and counting – are now without individual coverage thanks to policy cancellations brought about by Obamacare’s supposedly “higher” standards of coverage. Full time employees are becoming part time employees, as businesses try to keep their expenses in check by eliminating the number of employees eligible for higher-priced, employer-subsidized insurance plans, thanks to Obamacare. Governments in States that accepted the Obamacare yoke, along with its mandate to expand the Medicaid base, have to come up with incrementally more money without a commensurate expansion in their revenue bases to support the additional cost. And now insurers – a group that Obama certainly never intended to ostracize – are beginning to see just how deeply Obama’s signature law, as well as the enforcement liberties he’s threatening to take to “fix” its many problems, will affect their profitability. After Obama revealed his illegal plan today to bypass Congress and force insurance companies to continue offering plans that many of them have already cancelled (thanks to Obamacare), the industry started biting back. And for good reason: insurers have played along as the health care exchanges have been set up, perhaps benignly convinced that whatever market changes Obamacare brought about would just be passed along to consumers. The President’s revelation Thursday that he’d now “allow” these same companies to violate the law by offering their “substandard” policies for another year left many in the business wondering why they’d just sent out millions of cancellation letters. It also left them wondering how useful their idiocy had been to the President’s Obamacare politics this whole time. “[N]ow the Obama administration wants to make them [insurers] into a scapegoat,” wrote The Washington Post Thursday afternoon: “This doesn’t change anything other than force insurers to be the political flack jackets for the administration,” an insurance industry insider told Evan McMorris-Santoro. “So now, when we don’t offer these policies, the White House can say it’s the insurers doing this and not being flexible.” “Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” industry trade group representative Karen Ignagni told The Hill right after the President’s speech. Sounds like Obama’s scapegoats are already playing right into his hands. Watch out for Hillary, though. The Democrats need an Obamacare savior – and it has to come from someone on their side. GOP conservatives, which in this instance were right all along, will never have their voices heard – at least not unless Congress undergoes a major restructuring next year. “[T]he Obamacare battle is destined to become a proxy battle over control of the Democratic Party: a battle between presumed 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, and President Obama,” Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro wrote Thursday. “Obama wants to defend his program; Hillary wants to run against it, recognizing its inherent unpopularity.” Here’s a link to the full text of Obama’s Thursday Obamacare announcement: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/capitolreport/2013/11/14/transcript-of-obamas-announcement-on-health-insurance/