By David Limbaugh
Thursday, February 06, 2014
President Obama must believe he's politically untouchable
at this point, given his seeming indifference to the multitude of scandals,
failures and other outrages for which he is directly responsible.
I intended to write this column solely on the devastating
Congressional Budget Office report putting the final nail in the Obamacare
coffin -- or at least it would be the final nail in a sane world -- but
everywhere I turn in the news, I'm bombarded with evidence of equally troubling
nightmares. So, in fairness to balance and diversity, I decided not to dwell on
CBO-gate alone but to share with you the smorgasbord of disasters.
Let's begin with CBO-gate, which does deserve its own
column but will now have to accept but a few paragraphs here. I'm not so sure
what's more outrageous, the egregious news itself or the administration's and
the Democratic Party's disgracefully deceitful spinning in denying it.
There are just no two ways about it. On Tuesday, the CBO
released a report forecasting that the laughably titled Affordable Care Act
will cause the equivalent of more than 2 million full-time employees leaving
the U.S. workforce in the next decade. Note that the nonpartisan CBO didn't say
the law will initially cause unemployment and then later recover.
An administration that cared about the American people
wouldn't have spent the next 48 hours trying to distort this information into a
pretzelized news nugget that is less damaging to the administration. The White
House and Democrats came out of the woodwork trying to turn this spoiled,
rancid, inedible lemon into lemon meringue pie with dollops of whipped cream.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spun this as a positive development because
it lets Americans be "free agents." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
brags that people "are no longer job-blocked."
The CBO's projections aren't hard to believe, because
they are consistent with what we are already observing. CBO Director Douglas
Elmendorf said, "By providing heavily subsidized health insurance to people
with very low income and then withdrawing those subsidies as income rises, the
act creates a disincentive for people to work."
Consider another major news item that screamed its way
onto my computer screen. Tim Armstrong, CEO for AOL, said Obamacare will cost
his company an additional $7.1 million, so it has to decide whether to pass
that cost onto employees or cut other benefits (which, I might note, also would
come out of the employees' pockets -- you know, those little guys Obama
professes to care about). A less anecdotal report, from The Washington
Examiner, reveals that a Duke University survey of top companies found that 44
percent are considering reducing health benefits to current employees because
of Obamacare.
Also staring out at me from my desktop was the Washington
Post report that according to an analysis from Avalere Health, fewer than 2
million Americans enrolled in Medicaid in 2013 because of the Affordable Care
Act. The analysis concludes that there were between 1.1 million and 1.8 million
ACA sign-ups but says that many Medicaid enrollees would have signed up even
without the law. So the administration is not only grossly exaggerating the
number of sign-ups -- at some 6.3 million -- but also taking credit for them
when many would have happened anyway. Even CNN described this report as a blow
to the Obama administration, saying, "Just a fraction of the more than 6
million people the Obama administration has touted as being determined eligible
for Medicaid under Obamacare are new enrollees."
Next, I saw The Daily Caller's report that the
administration has unilaterally changed the law to allow immigrants with
"limited" terror contact into the United States. These new exemptions
are to a law that bars certain asylum seekers and refugees who provided
"limited material support" to terrorists who are believed to pose no
threat to the U.S. Doesn't that make you feel giddy?
My cyberspace monitor then directed my attention to a
disturbing Fox News report that the infernal Obamacare website doesn't provide
a way for customers to appeal errors when enrolling online for insurance. Now
here's a concrete example of how much this administration cares about the
"little guy." Fox, incidentally, did not break this story. The
Washington Post did and said that the problem has already impacted some 22,000
Americans who believe they got stiffed by the website by being overcharged, by
being steered into the wrong policies or otherwise. A House committee is
investigating.
The Wall Street Journal also elbowed its way onto my
screen, describing President Obama's claim that there was "not even a
smidgen of corruption" or political motivation in the Internal Revenue
Service's handling of groups applying for tax-exempt status as a "fairy
tale." In a separate story, the Journal reported that insurers are facing
pressure from regulators and lawmakers about plans that offer limited choices
of doctors and hospitals, which insurers say is vital to keep down coverage
prices because of Obamacare.
In other news, there's the ongoing Obama cover-up on
Benghazi and the recent confirmation from experts that our budgetary outlook is
headed straight to Hades because of unconscionable spending and Obama's
singular refusal even to consider entitlement reform.
There's plenty of good news, but I'll save my column on
the Gospel for Easter.
No comments:
Post a Comment