March, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 4: The Chutzpah Train, Its Not Obama's Fault, No Accountiability For Failure and More

This is our fourth post this month that is covering the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been doing this series on a monthly basis since last August and on a periodic basis for three years. The damage that this legislation is doing to our economy, the health of our nation’s citizens, the job creation process, and countless other areas of concern easily makes this the worst piece of Washington legislation ever enacted. And it is becoming clear it was enacted by the most inept set of Washington politicians ever.

We probably will not be done covering the past thirty days or so of insanity and idiocy from this law today. It is so bad that we will probably need to go at least a few more posts to cover the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

1) Kathleen Sebelius is the head of the Health and Human Services Department of the Federal government. She was the leader in the operationalizing of the law and its rollout. Given what a disaster the whole endeavor has been, let’s take a quick review of how poorly she did in her job:

• Despite spending over $600 million and having over three years lead time, the Obama Care Federal health insurance exchange website was a total disaster when it launched late last year.
• Many of the state level Obama Care health insurance exchange websites are as bad or worse than the Federal website.
• The information systems supporting Obama Care have been described as a hacker’s paradise and a hacker’s wet dream, endangering the privacy and financial security of millions of Americans.
• The system’s data flows were incomplete, wrong, or sent to total strangers.
• There were no facilities or abilities to do analyses of the types of people who were signing up, whether or not they were actually paying for insurance, and a bunch of other logistics shortcomings.
• The so-called Obama Care navigators were never subjected to background checks, resulted in criminals and illegal aliens having access to families’ personal information, making identity theft very easy.
• Deadlines and other dates were unilaterally cancelled or postponed because the operations were not ready for prime time.

Let’s cut it off here, you get the idea. In a real job in real life, she would have been fired long ago. But she still is in the same position that she was in when all of her failures started to pile up.

But the really sad thing is that there are actual people in the political class who still think she is doing a good job and should keep her position. The following clip is a video snippet of the Maryland Governor, Governor O’Malley stating that she is doing a fine job and should keep her job. He must not have been paying attention over the past five months of disasters:

http://libertyalliance.com/2014/03/gov-omalley-says-sebelius-good-job-wait/

What does one have to do, how incompetent does one have to be to get fired from a government position? Amazing.

2) Let’s stay with Sebelius a little longer. The Obama Care exchange website should have been up and bug free five months ago. My gosh, they spent over $600 million and had three years to get it right but they did not.

At this point they should be in a strictly maintenance mode, a mode that should be quite inexpensive relative to the development mode. But inexpensive is a word that rarely describes the Washington political class.

In an amazing act of chutzpah, Ms. Sebelius has asked for an astonishing $1.8 BILLION for the website needs in the next fiscal year budget. Let’s do some simple math to show how insane this request is:

• At $1.8 billion a year, this comes out to a business work day rate of spending $720,000 a DAY on the Obama Care website in a year.
• This comes out to spending an incredible $80,000 an HOUR on the website, a website that should already have been developed and bug free.
• For another perspective, if you had spent $2,400 a day every day since the day Jesus Christ was born, you still would not have spent $1.8 billion.

Unfathomable how the Washington political class can be so incompetent at such a high rate of wasteful spending, especially when it comes to Obama Care.

3) Let’s stay on the chutzpah train as the President hops on. Before reviewing what he said on a recent Spanish television town hall meeting, lets recall that 1) he promised over the years that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by about $2,500 and 2) he also promised back in September, 2013 that: "You're going to be able to purchase high-quality health insurance for less than the cost of your cellphone bill”

At that recent Spanish-language town hall, President Obama was asked a question from a viewer who said his family could not afford a $315 a month Oba,a Care health care insurance premium since his family was making $36,000 a year. This premium rate would be more than 10% of his pre-tax family income, certainly very expensive.

Rather than accept the blame that he was wrong when he promised that the average family would see thousands of dollars in savings on health insurance and that the cost of health insurance under Obama Care would be about the cost of a monthly cell phone bill (which is certainly nowhere close to $315 a month), he actually had the chutzpah and gall to blame the caller, who the President felt did not do a good enough job of prioritizing what that family was spending money on: 

“If you looked at their cable bill, their telephone, their cell phone bill, other things they're spending on, it may turn out that, it’s just they haven’t prioritized health care.” 

Unbelievable, is this person, the President of the United States, living in a state of denial? The legislation is bad and to blame, it is not the millions of American families across the country that spend too much on their cable bill, telephone bill, food, shelter, etc. God forbid it is anything that President Obama was involved in that caused a problem.

The actual interview where he blames the viewer and others for their bad priorities can be accessed at:

http://www.nrsc.org/blog/obama-obamacare-is-affordable...-if-you-cancel-your-cell-phone-and-cable?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=20140312_p-ocare-is-affordable-if-you-cancel-cable-and-cell_facebook&utm_content=p

4) A March 17, 2914 article from Bloomberg reviewed the survey results from Bankrate relative to Obama Care:

• 34% of survey respondents without insurance say they plan to stay that way, even after being told that the new law requires them to get covered or pay a penalty. 
• Of the 1,249 respondents without insurance, people age 18 to 29 were in fact the least likely to say they will remain uninsured, with just 28% making that claim.
• For those aged 50 to 64, the figure was 33% and for those aged 30 to 49, 39% said they would stay uninsured. 
• There's no correlation with education since the survey found that about one-third of every group, from high school dropouts to people with graduate degrees, say they'll remain uninsured. 
• The decision to stay uninsured isn't about political leanings since although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say they'll uninsured the difference was only 7%, 29% to 22%; the biggest difference being for uninsured independents, the biggest voting bloc, 41% of whom said they won't get insurance.

Thus, after three years of discussion, debate, news headlines, subsidies, television and other mass media advertising, Presidential and First Lady interviews and pleading, we are still looking at one third of uninsured Americans having already decided that they are not going to get health insurance coverage. 

Lousy job by the Obama administration in selling the program to America but just a lousy piece of legislation that no amount of selling could overcome? A good piece of legislation, like a good product or a good service, would have sold itself on its benefits. Nothing apparently is selling Obama Care.

In any case, whatever the cause, the legislation cannot be viewed as anything than a failure when it comes to its primary objective: providing low cost health care insurance to EVERY American. As the Congressional Budget Office has forecasted and this Bankrate survey supports, millions of Americans will still be without health insurance years down the road, contrary to what this President promised. But a broken promise from this President is nothing new.

More disasters tomorrow, if you can stand it.

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