An untrustworthy lying scoundrel like others of the same political persuasion. They lie to you and what you gonna do about it? In your eye, suckers.
There will be no loss of health cover under a government I lead
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Tag Archives: Obama
Calling Dr Cool
Mark Steyn at the end of a posted note on Obama and the American health care system:
Perhaps things will get so bad the coolest president ever will no longer seem quite so hip. But, alas, you’ll have to wait three years for a hip replacement. That’s government health care for you.
I’m sorry to give you the punch line first but it’s all pretty funny in a blackly humorous sort of way. It would probably be less funny if it were happening to you.
If he’s not a delusional fantasist then how do you explain it?
Obama is a sink hole of incompetence. Disaster follows him at every step and it is impossible to know whether this is by accident or by design. There is this minor story today, or at least it looks minor by the way it is placed on the page at Drudge, that the Saudis may be about to break diplomatic relations with the US. Now that is some level of incompetence! And given the low, low bow Obama gave to the Saudi king, suggests he just screwed up. It is not what he wanted. But do you think his constituency cares. I don’t even think they notice.
Anyway from Instapundit there are three related stories on the Obama approach. Not just tuned out but positively mentally ill. It’s more than just disengaged and aloof. He doesn’t want to know any of the bad stuff. Perfection will not accept that it has flaws. Each of these stories reinforces the others, but they are from obscure websites and never from the mainstream media where Obama remains a god. But this is the Obama that is readily seen if one actually looks.
OBAMACARE AND THE Absentee Presidency. “He and his close-knit advisers insist on a bad-news-ban around the Oval Office. Obama operates in a world without critical information — and that is his defense to two debacles. Critics understate the reluctance and inability of this president to lead and to govern. . . . This is a president who set up a system in which he imagines he is relieved of responsibility.”
Related: “He often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.” Plus: “If the story were about a conservative GOP President, one suspects the Times editors would have used stronger language and done much more to bang readers over the head with the clear inference that the man in the Oval Office engineered what the story calls a worst case scenario in Syria (maximum bloodbath, maximum danger of al-Qaeda gains, maximum chance of ugly Assad survival, maximum chance of Iranian victory, maximum danger for Jordan, maximum damage to prestige, interests and alliances of the United States) through a mix of empty and unrestrained rhetoric, awkward flip flops and half measures.”
UPDATE: Obama Disassociates From Reality. “The president spoke about ObamaCare as if it were a work of art, one or two brushstrokes away from being a masterpiece. Which created the impression that the president is living in a make believe world. . . . Mr. Obama, who at this point in his presidency has developed certain stale and unhealthy rhetorical habits, mocked Republicans and said it’s time for them to ‘stop rooting for [ObamaCare’s] failures.’ But the problem the president faces isn’t Republicans rooting for its failures; it’s that the program is collapsing on its own. The GOP had nothing to do with its development. The president desperately wishes he could share the blame for what has gone wrong. Except that every Republican in Congress opposed the Affordable Care Act. This is Barack Obama’s signature achievement; he and his party are joined at the hip to it. They are as inseparable as salt and water in the ocean.”
Ignorance rules
Government-run anything is a disaster waiting to happen, especially government-run governments. It is just that everyone seems to have to learn it for themselves. Our generation learned from watching the Soviet Union (what’s that? say all the under-40s). Now they have to learn it from their own soviet-type leaders, as with the Affordable Care Act in the US. This is taken directly off the Instapundit page as printed. Hilarious for the rest of the world; insanity for the US.
OCTOBER 21, 2013
BYRON YORK: President leads a surreal pep rally for ailing Obamacare.There was a lot of speculation about what President Obama would say when he made his first extended remarks about problems with the Affordable Care Act. Would he apologize? Would he crack the whip on his own administration, pledging that no more mistakes would be tolerated? Would he attempt to deflect blame to the Republicans who have long opposed Obamacare?
What few observers expected, given the ongoing failure of the Obamacare exchanges, was that Obama would hold a pep rally for the troubled system. And yet that is what he did. . . .
The president made a few more brief mentions of Obamacare’s technical deficiencies during his 28-minute speech, but in the end his Rose Garden appearance bore a great resemblance to the campaign-style speeches he made selling the health plan when Congress was considering it back in 2009 and 2010. (Minus, of course, the now-discredited promise that anyone who has coverage and likes it can keep it under the new system.)
Nothing about the event seemed to go smoothly. For example, Obama said anyone having trouble with the Obamacare website could call an 800 number to apply for coverage. “You can get your questions answered by real people, 24 hours a day, in 150 different languages,” Obama said. But a short time later, the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein tried the system and tweeted what he learned: “Can’t make this up. Got through to 800 number, followed prompts, and got referred to Healthcare.gov.”
Then there were the people Obama used as backdrops for his speech, people he said have “benefited from the Affordable Care Act already.” It turns out that was a stretch. One was a man who works in a Philadelphia restaurant, does not have health care through his employer, but has, according to a White House press handout, “recently used Healthcare.gov to process his application and is waiting for the options for potential plans.”
Another was a man just out of graduate school who has no health coverage but “is planning to enroll after he explores his coverage options on the D.C. exchange.” Yet another was a Tennessee small business owner who “was able to register through Healthcare.gov and now plans to comparison shop for the best plan that meets her budget and needs.”
As success stories go, they didn’t represent much success.
A short time after the president’s event, White House spokesman Jay Carney was either unable or unwilling to offer background on the website’s problems, on the testing that took place before the rollout, on the contractor involved, or on whether the administration will penalize Americans for not buying insurance when the website on which insurance is sold doesn’t work.
Talk about a bad day at the White House.
Even the traditional media are noticing.
And then immediately after – which means in time sequence, immediately before – we find this about the Canadian health care system.
OCTOBER 21, 2013
GOVERNMENT RUN HEALTH CARE: Surgery Caps In Canada:“There’s even more demand and they’re cutting back,” he said, adding he doesn’t blame the hospital or the surgeon, opthalmologist Dr. Barry Emara. But he believes people who’ve paid taxes to the Ontario government all their lives should get prompt access to health care now they need it. “It’s like a car insurance company saying ‘We’ve had two many accidents this year, we’re cutting everyone off.’”
The problem, according to hospital CEO David Musyj, is that the number of procedures – when it comes to cataracts, hips replacements and knee replacements – is capped by the Health Ministry. And hospital officials (up until October, cataracts were done by Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, which has since transferred cataracts to Windsor Regional) were scheduling surgeries based on the previous year’s cap of 5, 022. Then in September, they learned the cap for the fiscal year that started April 1 would be 4,849. In 2010, there were 5,412 procedures, he said. In a guest column published in today’s Windsor Star, Musyj said the cuts are due to the continuing rise in health care costs and governments looking for ways to cope with them.
When the government runs health care, it gets worse, but more expensive. Kind of like health care websites. A move in the free-market direction would accomplish the opposite, but presents fewer opportunities for graft.
It’s bizarre how things can be ruined so quickly. No one any longer even knows how things work, specially the President of the United States and his Democrat allies. They have no idea like their Leninist friends and mentors.The damage they cause will be incredible.
Far less than many of us hoped for but far better than what some had sought
So where are we now? The President and his Democrat cohort have been put on notice so that negotiations must now take place. Since default was never an option there was going to be an agreement of sorts to get us into the new year when the process can begin again. The sequester cuts, which really burn the Democrats up, have not been reversed and are not going to be reversed under any circumstances. The air space is now clear so that more attention can be focused on the many other screw ups of the Obama administration, most particularly the Affordable Care Act which will burn its way into community consciousness as it burns its way through the incomes of many an American. How to fix it from here is their problem but there will be a lot more sick Americans unable to find medical care at affordable prices as time goes on. Bulk stupidity but if it can’t be stopped it can’t be stopped.
What seems to have been agreed looks in many ways like the maximal position the Republicans might ever have realistically hoped to achieve given that the presidency and the Senate are in the hands of others and the media are like one great big ABC of leftist bias. Big win to the Democrats. I don’t think so, and certainly not if you are thinking about the long-term future of the American economy.
This is from The New York Times relayed via Drudge who of course describe the ongoing economic mismanagement of the American economy as a great victory for those responsible for these disasters:
Speaker John A. Boehner, the leader of conservative House Republicans whose push to strip money for the health law led to the shuttering of much of the government on Oct. 1, said that the House would not block a bipartisan agreement reached in the Senate that yielded virtually no concessions to the Republicans.
‘We fought the good fight,’ Mr. Boehner said in an interview with the radio station WLW-AM in Cincinnati. ‘We just didn’t win.’
In a statement issued as the Senate and the House prepared to vote on the proposal, Mr. Boehner said: ‘The fight will continue. But blocking the bipartisan agreement reached today by members of the Senate will not be a tactic for us.’
The decision came about 24 hours before the Treasury was due to exhaust its borrowing authority, putting the nation on the brink of a default. Mr. Boehner had earlier told colleagues privately that he would not allow the nation to default.
These are the details as reported:
Under the agreement, the government would be funded through Jan. 15, and the debt ceiling would be raised until Feb. 7. The Senate will take up a separate motion to instruct House and Senate negotiators to reach accord by Dec. 13 on a long-term blueprint for tax and spending policies over the next decade.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, stressed that under the deal, which he negotiated with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, budget cuts extracted in the 2011 fiscal showdown were not reversed, as some Democrats had wanted, a slim reed that not even he claimed as a significant victory.
The deal, Mr. McConnell said, ‘is far less than many of us hoped for, quite frankly, but far better than what some had sought.’
That the American economy will continue its rapid decline is just one of those things.
UPDATE: An interesting take by Tim Stanley in the UK’s Telegraph. But what is particularly interesting is the comment thread that follows. Here, however, is his core point.
What has Obama really won? He keeps his precious healthcare reform and he gets government open again – but tomorrow morning he’ll still have the same gridlocked political system that he had the night before. The shutdown is a rare example of him winning, but remember that this lame duck president has not only had a very simple (and, frankly, inoffensive) gun control bill killed in the Senate but was so spooked by bad poll numbers that he tried to dump responsibility for military action in Syria onto the Congress – before quietly dropping the idea altogether. Any thought that the shutdown payoff will be that he can sail an immigration reform package comfortably through Congress is pure fantasy. This is a broken presidency living out its last few years either holding off Republican attacks or lazily cruising the country on some pointless, endless, fatuous campaign trail. Obama’s administration is politically bankrupt.
The prospect of a one-party state in the US
I am like David Horowitz in having had communist parents and having grown up in a household in which plotting against the state with other subversives was second nature. In many ways it provides for us who have turned against the left a form of understanding that gives clarity for what to others are arguable perspectives. In this article Horowitz is trying to say something that should frighten you about the totalitarian world that is forming right before our eyes at a speed that is totally beyond any expectation.
His article is titled “The Threat We Face” and this is the central point about the direction in which the US is right now, right this minute, heading and taking us with it.
Today the Obama juggernaut is systematically bankrupting our country, and undoing our constitutional arrangements. Its contempt for consultative and representative government is relentlessly on display. This week Senate Majority leader Harry Reid defended his refusal to negotiate with Republicans over Obamacare and the debt in these words: ‘We are here to support the federal government. That’s our job.’ End quote. Forget about representing the people whom our Founders made sovereign. Forget what America is about.
The fact that I had a radical past allowed me to see much of this coming. But even I never thought we would be looking so soon at the prospect of a one-party state. Those words may sound hyperbolic, but take a moment to think about it. If you have transformed the taxing agency of the state into a political weapon – and Obama has; if you are setting up a massive government program to gather the financial and health information of every citizen, and control their access to care; and if you have a spy agency that can read the mail and listen to the communications of every individual in the country, you don’t really need a secret police to destroy your political opponents. Once you have silenced them, you can proceed with your plans to remake the world in your image.
I have written much the same recently myself over here. This was my final para in that post:
The full resources of the American government are being used in a punitive way against individuals and groups, against American citizens who disagree with the President. In reading not just the American media but even the right side blogs, the most astonishing part is the absence of expressions of genuine outrage. Maybe with the American media as latently totalitarian as it is there is nothing that can be done, and maybe no one writing a blog wants to be done over by the tax office, but if it doesn’t make you seriously angry, and not just a little frightened, I don’t know what would.
What can be done about anything I cannot at this stage imagine. The media in the United States are corrupted by their own grossly superficial and far left-oriented understanding of every issue of importance, from foreign policy through economics and down to the Constitutional protections of individual rights. That the use of the IRS to persecute individuals is not seen as an absolute abuse of power intolerable in anyone’s hands and is not portrayed loudly and regularly in this way by the media is the final proof that the notion of the fourth estate as a guarantor and protector of our freedoms is hollow. They are a major part of the problem for which solutions evade me.
Recognition of Obama for who he is and what he wants is the first place to start but how will the alarm be sent? How will anyone beyond a handful find out? Who will actually be the Paul Revere who will bring the message that the red press is perverting your freedoms? Where are the constituencies that can turn that concern into a policy of action? It’s not even all that obvious to most on this side of politics. To the other side, they are more than content because they are winning on the politics because they have virtually every means of communication in their hands. The national socialists are in charge in the US and if you don’t like it and try to say or do anything about it, they will soon see how much you like being done over by the IRS and that’s just for a start.
Law of Markets 