Obamacare: Democrats Starting to Run But There’s No Place to Hide

Rick Moran
PJ Tatler
PJ Media
2/16/2013

It was inevitable that once the blanks contained in Obamacare began to be filled in, that even Democratic supporters of the law would start running away from it, so toxic it is going to be to any politician who supported it. The unintended — and intended – consequences are proving to be a nightmare for the health insurance consumer and the government seems powerless to do anything about it.

A hearing on Thursday of the Senate Finance Committee turned into a Democratic Obamacare bashing-fest as four powerful Democratic senators “laid into” the administration’s top regulator on new health exchanges. Senators Max Baucus, Ron Wyden, and Bill Nelson, and Maria Cantwell all lambasted Gary Cohen, deputy administrator and director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, for several snafus and screw ups in the ACA that would price millions of Americans out of health insurance coverage and make getting health insurance through the exchanges a nightmare…

…The fiscal cliff deal, approved by Congress on New Year’s Day, eliminated most of the more than $1.4 billion in remaining funding for the program. Nearly $2 billion in funding had already been awarded to co-ops in 24 states, but those in other states, including Florida, were shut out.

“The people of Florida are going to suffer,” he told Cohen. “I want someone to be held accountable for this.”

Cohen said he didn’t know why the White House had agreed to cut the funding as part of the deficit deal…

…This is probably one area where the Democrats’ effort to blame Republicans for something will backfire. This is their baby. They wanted to make history and they did. They bragged about it for two years. They ran on a platform that made it a centerpiece of their governance…

Read the entire article at The PJ Tatler.

Related:  Obamacare Fail

…Tens of thousands of Americans who cannot get health insurance because of preexisting medical problems will be blocked from a program designed to help them because funding is running low…

Also, Critical Condition Conservatives were right about ObamaCare, a lefty website concedes.

When we saw the headline “Four Ways ObamaCare Could Still Fail,” our reaction was that it sounded like an unrealistically low estimate. But we read the article because we were intrigued because of the source: TalkingPointsMemo.com, a news site with a strong (and acknowledged) liberal Democratic slant. Its framing as friendly criticism makes the piece, by congressional reporter Sahil Kapur, a powerful indictment of ObamaCare.

To be sure, it’s not clear Kapur intends to indict ObamaCare, and if he does, he downplays it, presumably in order to avoid alienating his liberal readers or his liberal editors. In his lead paragraph, he summarizes the problem as follows: “Republicans remain committed to botching its implementation, which–along with inherent complexities in implementing parts of the law–leaves in place significant obstacles to achieving its key goals.”

When you read the rest of the piece, however, it’s clear that the emphasis should be reversed: The law’s deficiencies–or “inherent complexities,” to use Kapur’s obfuscatory euphemism–are the primary difficulty. The Republican commitment to botchery is real, and it does compound ObamaCare’s problems, but it is a secondary problem.

Kapur lists “the four biggest obstacles the law faces in meeting its key goals.” Let’s go through them one by one…

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