Subdued by distracting media elites chattering about Joe Biden’s non-campaign for president, behind the curtain of the alleged “debacle” and “catastrophic dysfunction” of the Republican House Speaker race and swept under the carpet embroidered with the words, “Trump Says Bush Responsible for 9/11,” is news that should be dominating newspaper front pages across the country.
Americans are facing an Obamacare disaster that is ruining their lives.
Is the “Trump-Bush-9/11” dust-up causing Americans to frantically find health insurance that was cancelled due to Obama’s co-ops collapsing?
Are millions of Americans being threatened with hundreds of dollars in fines because Republicans are debating who should be their next House Speaker?
Since when is a Democratic Party Vice President’s foot-dragging on deciding whether or not to run for the Presidency a more profound story than Obamacare in an out-of-control death spiral, dragging millions into the abyss?
“Obamacare Enrollment Flatlines as 6th Insurance Co-op Fails” reported Investors Business Daily, one of the the few outlets that actually reported this collapse.
The number of failures continues to grow. According to Richard Pollock’s story at The Daily Caller, one third of Obamacare health insurance co-ops have failed.
“The failing Obamacare co-ops have canceled health insurance for largely poor and low-income customers in Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Vermont, New York and Colorado,” Pollock reported.
This is the brilliant plan liberals insisted would provide guaranteed major medical insurance to poor and low-income Americans while deriding and name-calling conservative think tanks that predicted such financial crashes.
Conservative Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Avik Roy wrote in a May 2012 Forbes article that “Obamacare, according to the White House, will waste over $3 billion on faulty loans to state-sponsored health insurers called CO-OPs. It’s bad enough that taxpayer funds are going down the tubes. But internal documents show that the administration isn’t particularly bothered by it.”
Administration officials blandly admit more co-ops are due to fail.
Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, which were supposed to keep the exchanges open for 15 years, have been already spent. The Washington Examiner reports $25 million meant for three co-ops was diverted to a for-profit organization run by a colleague of President Obama when he was a senator.
To keep the failing co-ops afloat for as many months as possible, most are lobbying for huge rate hikes. Utah is reportedly requesting a 58 percent increase in premiums, Montana wants to gouge people an additional 42 percent and Tennessee is begging for 33 percent more.
Remember 2012 to 2013, when Obamacare premiums increased by an average of 49 percent? The promise was that Obamacare would end private insurance increases of an “unacceptable” 10 percent for some years.
One might hope Obama regrets taking the Little Sisters of the Poor to the Supreme Court to make the nuns pay for contraceptives now that the program is collapsing.
Seriously.
Millions of Americans are being forced (under severe penalty) to find new plans to buy with just a couple of weeks to go when Obamacare open enrollment starts. And still, enrollments are half of what the administration and the Congressional Budget Office predicted.
The current projection is there will be fewer people enrolled in Obamacare next year than there were as of March of this year, while Obama’s IRS is threatening small businesses with $36,500 fines for helping employees with health insurance costs.
Really.
Any employer-based plan or agreement that pays for or reimburses employees for their individual health insurance premiums is considered to be a “group health insurance plan” that is subject to the government’s $100-per-day penalty.
The co-ops are failing, premiums are unaffordable, millions of taxpayer dollars have reportedly been diverted to lobbyists and crony companies, young and healthy Americans are not signing up and all that’s left is to gouge Americans needing insurance even further while threatening them with huge fines and penalties.
Welcome to the brilliant transformation to the glorious socialist reform of major medical health insurance.
Rick Jensen is Delaware’s award-winning conservative talk show host on WDEL, streaming live on WDEL.com from 1pm - 4pm EST. Contact Rick at rick@wdel.com, or follow him on Twitter @Jensen1150WDEL