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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Kathleen Sebelius</title>
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	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
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		<title>Secretary of Health Leaves Over ObamaCare Failure</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/secretary-of-health-leaves-over-obamacare-failure/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=secretary-of-health-leaves-over-obamacare-failure</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/secretary-of-health-leaves-over-obamacare-failure/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2014 23:12:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223169</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[She wasn’t at the Rose Garden ceremony ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Kathleen_Sebelius.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-223170" alt="Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius Campaigns For Obama In Michigan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Kathleen_Sebelius-233x350.jpg" width="233" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Yes I know, ObamaCare is a huge, huge success. So incredibly huge that most people hate it and its &#8216;success&#8217; came from forcing people who had lost their health insurance because of ObamaCare to sign up for its worthless policies.</p>
<p>And now that Obama Inc. is celebrating its &#8216;success&#8217;, it&#8217;s the perfect time to shove Sebelius quietly out the door without it looking like a punishment for failure.</p>
<p>But I&#8217;m sure she&#8217;s just &#8216;<a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/10/sebelius-to-resign-as-secretary-of-hhs/">retiring to spend more time with her famil</a>y.&#8217;</p>
<blockquote><p>Officials said Ms. Sebelius, 65, made the decision to resign and was not forced out. But the frustration at the White House over her performance had become increasingly clear, as administration aides worried that the crippling problems at HealthCare.gov, the website set up to enroll Americans in insurance exchanges, would result in lasting damage to the president’s legacy…</p>
<p>Allegedly she jumped rather than waiting to be pushed, but the Times catches something I missed last week. She wasn’t at the Rose Garden ceremony where O declared Mission Accomplished after they hit seven million. Hard to believe she wouldn’t want to be there to join the victory lap after taking so much grief from so many sides for so long over the website. Was she not invited?</p></blockquote>
<p>Sebelius does deserve some of the blame.</p>
<p>While ObamaCare is inherently unworkable, the bad decisions at the top turned Healthcare.gov into an expensive disaster. In any ordinary circumstance, wasting that much money on a non-working website would have lead to a resignation.</p>
<p>Obama Inc. and its media outlets are spinning this as Sebelius nobly taking the fall to avoid negative Republican attacks, which is a neat feint since it&#8217;s rather doubtful that she suddenly decided to leave voluntarily just when she would be able to claim credit for getting the job done.</p>
<p>The UK&#8217;s Guardian, a left-wing paper, is much less invested in kissing Obama&#8217;s feet, and so the headline<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/10/health-secretary-kathleen-sebelius-to-quit-after-botched-obamacare-rollout"> is a blast of media reality</a>.</p>
<p>&#8220;Health secretary Kathleen Sebelius quits after botched Obamacare rollout&#8221;</p>
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		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Indefinitely Extended Deadline</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamacares-indefinitely-extended-deadline/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-indefinitely-extended-deadline</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamacares-indefinitely-extended-deadline/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:50:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[delay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mandate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[March 31]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221988</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Obama administration is bypassing the the insurance sign-up cut-off date. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/article-2579376-1C3B10C300000578-384_634x449.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221989" alt="article-2579376-1C3B10C300000578-384_634x449" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/article-2579376-1C3B10C300000578-384_634x449-450x309.jpg" width="270" height="185" /></a>The Obama administration&#8217;s contempt for the rule of law has hit a new low. On Tuesday night, federal officials revealed that Americans who claim they have been unable to enroll in healthcare plans on the federal exchange will be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-administration-will-allow-more-time-to-enroll-in-health-care-on-federal-marketplace/2014/03/25/d0458338-b449-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_print.html">granted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an extension past the March 31 deadline. “We are . . . making sure that we will be ready to help consumers who may be in line by the deadline to complete enrollment — either online or over the phone,” said Julie Bataille, director of the office of communications for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The move reeks of desperation. Once again, as the administration did for calculating premium subsidies based on one&#8217;s income, no actual verification is necessary. People need only check a blue box on the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://healthcare.gov/">HealthCare.gov</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> website indicating that they tried to enroll before the deadline, and they will have until mid-April &#8212; or perhaps longer &#8212; to ask for an extension based on the &#8220;honor system.&#8221; In other words, the government will make no effort whatsoever to determine if people are telling the truth. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is immune to the absurdity. &#8220;This is not an extension of open enrollment,&#8221; she </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/26/Sebelius-Obamacare-Extension-Is-Not-An-Extension">told</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Michigan Fox 2 yesterday. &#8220;It is just saying, like you do on election day, if you&#8217;re in line to vote, we want to make sure you vote.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of all the illegal and unconstitutional extensions implemented by the Obama administration, this one is the most egregious. Previously, when the president and his minions rewrote the bill passed by Congress, signed by the president and reverently described by Democrats and their media allies as the &#8220;law of the land,&#8221; they cited the &#8220;statutory authority&#8221; to do so. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This time they can&#8217;t even hide behind that dubious facade. In a conference call with reporters on March 11, DHS officials </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/hhs-we-lack-statutory-authority-extend-obamacares-open-enrollment-period_784621.html">insisted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that March 31 was the hard deadline for ObamaCare enrollment. HHS official Julie Bataille took it one step further. &#8220;We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period,&#8221; she promised. &#8220;In fact, we don&#8217;t actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014.&#8221; Michael Hash, who directs the Office of Health Reform at HHS, affirmed that statement, noting that the healthcare bill states that the HHS Secretary must set the deadline for open enrollment dates by June 2012. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did just that. &#8220;Once that 2014 open enrollment period has been set, they are set permanently,&#8221; Hash declared.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sebelius herself also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2589559/Busted-After-promising-no-delay-final-Obamacare-sign-deadline-Obama-administration-unveils-new-honor-extension-mid-April.html">confirmed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that reality a day later. During a March 12 congressional hearing she told Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) that there would be no extensions. &#8220;Are you going to delay the open enrollment beyond March 31?&#8221; Brady asked. &#8220;No, sir,&#8221; Sebelius replied.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Despite such transparent lying, the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> was more than up to the task of attempting to give the administration wiggle room. &#8220;The rules, which will apply to the federal exchanges operating in three dozen states, will essentially create a large loophole even as White House officials have repeatedly said that the March 31 deadline was firm,&#8221; the paper states. &#8220;The extra time will not technically alter the deadline but will create a broad new category of people eligible for what’s known as a special enrollment period.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So why would the administration need a &#8220;special enrollment period&#8221;? The implications are obvious: enrollment is nowhere near where the administration needs it to be. &#8220;I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014,&#8221; Sebelius </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/01/03/the-white-houses-claim-that-7-million-enrolled-in-obamacare-was-never-our-target-number/">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> during an NBC News interview on September 30, 2013. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The administration soon backed off that number, and Vice President Joe Biden ratcheted it down even further last month. &#8220;We may not get to seven million, we may get to five or six, but that&#8217;s a hell of a start,&#8221; he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/20/us-usa-healthcare-biden-idUSBREA1J02N20140220">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet even Joe&#8217;s &#8220;hell of a start&#8221; is problematic. As the administration itself was forced to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/19/white-house-admits-a-fifth-of-obamacare-enrollees-wont-buy-insurance/">admit</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> last week, at least 20 percent of so-called ObamaCare &#8220;enrollees&#8221; are people who haven&#8217;t paid their insurance premiums. &#8220;We can point you to major insurers who have placed that figure at 80 percent, give-or-take, depending on the insurer, but we don&#8217;t have specific data that is going to be in a reliable enough form to provide,&#8221; </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/03/18/carney_we_dont_have_specific_data_for_people_who_have_paid_obamacare_premiums.html">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. The White House has repeated that mantra, claiming that they only have data about those selecting plans, because those enrolled are expected to pay insurance companies directly.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Two Republicans aren&#8217;t buying it. On Tuesday, David Camp (R-MI) and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/201715-gop-again-accuses-sebelius-of-misleading">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> they have uncovered “new evidence” that “strongly suggests that the administration knows who has enrolled and paid their first month’s premium.” They cited CMS regulations that </span>require<span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> insurance companies to inform the agency of  “the full enrollment and payment profile” for consumers on a </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">month-to-month basis.</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> A </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/camp_brady_letter_to_sec_sebelius_on_exchanges_3_25_14.pdf">letter</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> sent by Camp and Brady to Sebelius states, &#8220;On January 16, 2014, CMS posted a series of FAQs on the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.regtap.info/">www.regtap.info</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> portal. The portal is used by insurers to receive basic information about how to receive payments, what information is required of them and in what format, etc.&#8221; Based on the requirements contained in those guidelines, Camp and Brady contend &#8220;there is specific information about who has paid their premium that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is collecting and using to make payments to insurers,&#8221; and they &#8220;want this information in its most updated form immediately.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters indicated that HHS wouldn&#8217;t comply. “As we have said previously, information about who has paid his or her premium is collected by individual issuers and is not reported to CMS directly by enrollees,” she contended. “Until the automated payment and reporting system is completed and fully tested, and CMS is able to access individual enrollment and payment information from individual 834 forms, the payment information that CMS receives from insurers is neither final nor complete. When we have accurate and reliable data regarding premium payments, we will make that information available.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That in and of itself is a remarkable statement with respect to the 834 forms. Those are the forms that are </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/administration-reports-25percent-error-rate-on-obamacare-forms-from-october/2013/12/06/695d508e-5ea8-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html">supposed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to be sent early </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">each night</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from the federal exchange system to participating insurers, telling them who has signed up. In turn, insurers send each customer a bill, and those consumers have to pay their first month&#8217;s premium before coverage begins. The error rate, which had been as high as 25 percent last November, has ostensibly been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115837/obamacare-834-error-rate-falls-25-percent-10-percent">reduced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to 10 percent. Yet now the administration is admitting that the system has neither been completed nor tested. If that&#8217;s the case, how is it that the administration can give out </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">any</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> reliable numbers, even those regarding signups?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the administration has done just that, contending that 5.2 million Americans have signed up for the plan as of the middle of March. Thus it appears Sebelius and/or Peters is lying. Camp and Brady believe it is Sebelius, who they accuse of giving &#8220;evasive and perhaps misleading&#8221; testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee on March 14.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So what? Sebelius is hardly the first Obama administration official to do that, and there have been no consequences whatsoever for any of them. Thus, when Peters </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/201791-boehner-what-the-hell-is-this-a-joke">insists</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the elimination of the deadline is due to a &#8220;surge in demand,&#8221; all we get from Republicans such as John Boehner (R-OH) are complaints, absent any threat of concrete action. “The dates are the dates, and the law is the law,” Boehner groused. “The president doesn’t have the authority to change the law whenever he wants, which he continues to do.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With impunity. A CMS source has told the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Daily Mail</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> there is no set date for the extended deadline, and the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> insists that even if people can no longer get extensions through the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://healthcare.gov/">HealthCare.gov</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> website, &#8220;consumers will be able to request one through one of the federally sponsored call centers nationwide.&#8221; Comically, the paper further notes that the grounds for granting such an extension &#8220;will become narrower, matching rules for special enrollment periods that have existed for the past few months.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sure they will &#8212; unless there’s another “fix” implemented, any time the administration decides to do it. Obama and company have made it clear there are </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">no</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> aspects of this law that are above manipulation.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the ultimate testimony to Democratic arrogance, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/issues/harry-reid-people-arent-educated-on-how-to-use-the-internet/">attempted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to shift the blame for the law&#8217;s disastrous rollout onto the American public, &#8220;because people are not educated on how to use the Internet.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And so it goes for a Democratic Party and an Obama administration for whom the rule of law has become little more than what they say it is, until it must be changed for nothing more than political expediency. In reality there is only one &#8220;law&#8221; to which the American left religiously adheres: by any means necessary. Whether our democratic republic can survive three more years of such overt contempt remains to be seen. We are truly in uncharted waters.</span></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Desperate Times for ObamaCare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/desperate-times-for-obamacare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=desperate-times-for-obamacare</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/desperate-times-for-obamacare/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:45:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ellen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[premiums]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[skyrocket]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221546</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama's con is pillaging America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obamacare-supreme-court_-protest-6001.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-221548" alt="Affordable Care Act Supreme Court" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obamacare-supreme-court_-protest-6001.jpg" width="341" height="273" /></a>The air of desperation surrounding ObamaCare gets thicker and thicker with each passing day. And no matter how dishonest President Obama, his administration officials, Democrats and their media allies, are in their attempt to fool the public, painful truths about this disaster can no longer be obscured. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We begin with premiums. As </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/201136-obamacare-premiums-are-about-to-skyrocket">revealed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Hill</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, they are about to &#8220;skyrocket,&#8221; with costs in some parts of the country increasing by as much as 200 percent. Unsurprisingly, this revelation runs completely counter to the Obama administration&#8217;s claims, most recently advanced by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in last week&#8217;s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee. “The increases are far less significant than what they were prior to the Affordable Care Act,” the Secretary said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Except that they&#8217;re not. A </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/affordable-care-act/price-index">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by eHealth explains that premiums in the individual health market have risen 39 percent for individuals, and 56 percent for families, since February 2013. Minus the subsidies, the average cost of an individual plan is now $274, and a family plan is now $663 per month, up from $446 last year. And despite Sebelius&#8217;s contention, these figures are higher than those recorded between 2005 and 2013, when individual and family premiums rose at a rate of 37 percent and 31 percent, respectively.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Administration officials counter that subsidies will bring those costs down. That is certainly true, but those so-called reductions aren&#8217;t reductions at all. They merely shift the part of a premium&#8217;s cost from the individual or family insurance consumers to the taxpayers at large. This cost-shifting goes a long way towards explaining why a plan the president and his party </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-now-estimated-cost-26-trillion-first-decade_648413.html">promised</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> would cost $900 billion over a decade when it was first introduced, quickly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-now-estimated-cost-26-trillion-first-decade_648413.html">tripled</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $2.7 trillion. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With regard to those premium increases, the biggest driver should have been the most obvious: Americans are now required to purchase </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.healthcare.gov/what-does-marketplace-health-insurance-cover/">“essential health benefits,”</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> another wildly misleading euphemism designed to obscure yet another, but far more pernicious aspect of cost-shifting embodied in ObamaCare. There is nothing remotely essential in requiring a 50-year-old man to be covered for maternity and newborn care, or senior citizens to be covered for pediatric services. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thus, many insurers are utterly baffled by Sebelius&#8217;s contention, especially in light of the disastrous rollout of the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://healthcare.gov/">healthcare.gov</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> website. “It’s pretty shortsighted because I think everybody knows that the way the exchange has rolled out … is going to lead to higher costs,” said one senior insurance executive who requested anonymity. That same executive said he expects insurance rates to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">triple</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the &#8220;populous swing state&#8221; from which he hails. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other insurance executives were equally frustrated with another cost driver, namely the administration&#8217;s unconstitutional penchant for changing the parameters of the law. They cited the administration&#8217;s decision to allow people to keep their old insurance policies instead of forcing them onto the exchanges, the limited amount of money government has to help cover the costs of older and sicker patients, and the under-enrollment of the so-call &#8220;young invincibles&#8221; that could help keep costs down. “We’re exasperated,” the same unnamed executive contended. “All of these major delays on very significant portions of the law are going to change what it’s going to cost.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The lack of enrollment by young healthy Americans could be the deciding factor in determining those costs. The current data is not </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-18/young-invincibles-are-killing-obamacare">breaking well</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for an administration that projected the percentage of ObamaCare purchasers in the 18 to 35 age group would be 40 percent. As of March 1, approximately 4.2 million Americans had selected an ObamaCare plan. Less than 1.1 million, or only 25 percent of them, belonged to that demographic. From October through February, the number of signups averaged out to 840,000 per month. In order to reach the 40 percent figure by the end of this month, more than 900,000 people would have to sign up for the plan &#8212; and everyone of them and their covered family members would have to be between the ages of 18 and 35.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And once again, note the term &#8220;sign ups.&#8221; On Tuesday, embattled White House Press Secretary Jay Carey was finally forced to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/19/white-house-admits-a-fifth-of-obamacare-enrollees-wont-buy-insurance/">admit</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> what many Americans have known for a long time: sign ups isn&#8217;t remotely the same as </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">pay</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> ups. “We can point you to major insurers who have placed that [pay up] figure at 80 percent, give-or-take, depending on the insurer,” Carney said. That means one-in-five don&#8217;t have actual coverage. When Fox News correspondent Ed Henry originally asked Carney why the administration continues to use the word &#8220;enrolled,&#8221; Carney declined to answer.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The lack of candor is hardly an anomaly. The president and his party promised that health insurance would be more affordable, saving families as much as $2500 per year in costs. That was a baldfaced lie. But it was the lesser of two baldfaced lies with which insurance companies had to cope. The greater lie was the president&#8217;s oft-repeated promise that Americans could keep their doctor and their healthcare providers. Faced with bad or worse, insurance companies chose bad: in response to the Obama administration&#8217;s benefit mandates, taxes and regulations, they narrowed provider networks to keep premium costs down. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, even that option didn&#8217;t work. Despite narrow, sometimes drastically narrow, networks that deprived many Americans of critical care formerly provided by their &#8220;bad apple&#8221; insurance policies, premium prices </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">still</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> increased by double digits in most markets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Remarkably, the administration&#8217;s &#8220;solution&#8221; for the problem will inevitably exacerbate it. The HHS sent a letter to insurance companies informing them that they must provide &#8220;reasonable access&#8221; to doctors and hospitals beginning next year, including an expansion of access to &#8220;essential community providers&#8221; from 20 percent to 30 percent. In addition, healthcare regulators will looking at other cost-cutting features in insurers&#8217; plans, in an effort to determine if they are &#8220;discriminatory&#8221; with regard to discouraging sick Americans to sign up for healthcare. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As is typical with this administration, the term &#8220;reasonable access&#8221; is left undefined, doubtless to give them case-by-case leverage against those insurers they wish to single out for the kind of political humiliation that deflects blame away from the Obama administration and a Democratic Party wholly responsible for this mess. As for the word &#8220;discrimination,&#8221; is there even a scintilla of doubt that it will be used as a club to browbeat those same insurers?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Another undefined term could be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/20/medical-group-that-backed-obamacare-warns-obscure-rule-could-hurt-doctors/">far more</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> problematic. ObamaCare gives customers a 90-day grace period for unpaid premiums before insurers can cancel their coverage. Yet insurers are only responsible for claims made in the first 30 days. During the next 60 days, insurers can place subsequent claims in a &#8220;pending status&#8221;&#8211;and ultimately deny payment for them if insurance is cancelled, leaving healthcare providers on the hook. The administration contends the grace period rule is limited to those who have already paid one month&#8217;s premium, and requires insurance companies to notify healthcare providers &#8220;as soon as practicable&#8221; when those customers are in arrears. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The American Medical Association (AMA), which shamelessly shilled for the passage of ObamaCare, grasped the implications. &#8220;Managing risk is typically a role for insurers, but the grace period rule transfers two-thirds of that risk from the insurers to physicians and health care providers,&#8221; AMA President Ardis Dee Hoven said in a statement. On Wednesday, they provided their members with </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/2014/2014-03-19-ama-issues-grace-period-guide-to-assist-physicians.page">guidelines</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to help them manage that possibility. But even those guidelines couldn&#8217;t obscure the truth. &#8220;The Centers for Medicare &amp; Medicaid Services (CMS) regulations do not specify how the health insurance issuer must notify you when one of your patients enters the grace period,&#8221; they stated. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Perhaps the biggest and most painful truth about ObamaCare was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/16/curl-we-completely-overhauled-american-health-care/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&amp;utm_medium=RSS">illuminated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Times&#8217;</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Joseph Curl, who reminds us that original impetus behind the bill was to insure the 46 million Americans President Obama warned us were only “one illness away from financial ruin.” As Curl noted the above enrollment figures of only 4.2 million, or just 9 percent of the 46 million cited by Obama, he asked the obvious question: We changed the $2.7 trillion health care system to sign up 4.2 million people?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If data compiled by Goldman Sachs are correct, even that paltry number is misleading. The investment bank projects that the Obamacare exchanges will end up actually </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">enrolling</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 4 million people&#8211;but only 1 million of them will have been previously uninsured.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Regardless, the bill&#8217;s cheerleaders remain defiant. When Obama appeared on her TV show, useful idiot Ellen DeGeneres </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2014/03/20/ellen-sucks-obama-obamacare-doing-very-very-welli-think-everyones-very-g">contended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that &#8220;everyone&#8217;s very grateful&#8221; for Obamacare. The terminally clueless Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who defied the available data and </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/201299-pelosi-we-couldnt-be-prouder-of-obamacare">contended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that ObamaCare has &#8220;dramatically&#8221; slowed the growth in healthcare costs, insisted Democrats &#8220;couldn&#8217;t be prouder&#8221; of the bill and that it would backfire for the GOP as a campaign plank. Slate&#8217;s David Weigel </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/03/defending_obamacare_why_aren_t_democrats_using_the_approach_republicans.html?wpisrc=burger_bar">believes</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> all Democrats have to do is &#8220;find Obamacare success stories.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Again, reality bites. As </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Hill</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> reveals, opposition to ObamaCare </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/201311-o-care-opinions-holding-steady-despite">remains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> near its all time high with a 53 percent disapproval rating. ABC’s Jeff Zeleny </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/17/abc-democrats-privately-admit-obamacare-is-political-poison/">revealed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that &#8220;privately several Democrats tell ABC News they’re increasingly worried the health care law is political poison.&#8221; As for ObamaCare stories, here&#8217;s a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/03/20/50-states-50-obamacare-horror-stories-%E2%80%A6-are-they-all-lying-harry-reid">compilation</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of 50 negative ones&#8211;from every state in the union.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the ultimate reality is the simplest one for the American public to grasp. The president and his administration have taken a duly enacted law and made a complete and unconstitutional mockery of it, altering or delaying every onerous piece for nothing more than transparent political considerations. They have done so with complete complicity from Congressional Democrats, who have made an equal mockery of the constitutionally-mandated separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. That&#8217;s how the president, his administration and Democrats have </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">demonstrated</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, not talked about their &#8220;pride&#8221; for ObamaCare. </span></p>
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		<title>Woman Who Screwed Up $600 Mil Website Demands Investigation to Find the Real Site Killers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/woman-who-screwed-up-600-mil-website-demands-investigation-to-find-the-real-site-killers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=woman-who-screwed-up-600-mil-website-demands-investigation-to-find-the-real-site-killers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/woman-who-screwed-up-600-mil-website-demands-investigation-to-find-the-real-site-killers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Dec 2013 18:49:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CMS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212980</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“I believe strongly in the need for accountability," Sebelius said.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/t2ec16rhjgwe9nytuzbrbwsgwg60_57.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-212981" alt="t2ec16rhjgwe9nytuzbrbwsgwg60_57" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/t2ec16rhjgwe9nytuzbrbwsgwg60_57-262x350.jpg" width="262" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t laugh. Or you <a href="http://www.jammiewf.com/2013/hilarious-clueless-sebelius-demands-investigation-into-screwed-up-obamacare-website/">just might get &#8220;investigated</a>&#8220;.</p>
<blockquote><p>Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a blog post early Wednesday that she is asking the department’s inspector general to investigate the contracting process, management, performance and payment issues that may have contributed to the flawed launch of HealthCare.gov.</p></blockquote>
<p>I bet this investigation will only cost 2 billion dollars and produce nothing usable. But I can handle the job for 50 cents and a cup of coffee.</p>
<p>CMS, the Centers for Medicare &amp; Medicaid Services, a sub-agency of United States Department of Health and Human Services, presided over by one Kathleen Sebelius, chose to handle the implementation and coordination <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/362399/one-mistake-putting-cms-charge-whole-obamacare-project-veronique-de-rugy">of the work for all the contractors</a>. Even though CMS had no experience tackling something as big as this, it chose to supervise it.</p>
<p>The buck stops with Sebelius because her agency supervised the project and was supposed to test it, implement it and bring all the pieces together.</p>
<p>Sure the big part of the job shouldn&#8217;t have been given to a Canadian company with a bad track record whose only asset was a top executive who just happened to be a pal of Michelle Obama&#8217;s from their time working on radical black groups. But Sebelius had the final responsibility.</p>
<p>Now she&#8217;s playing O.J. Simpson and demanding to know who the real site killers are.</p>
<blockquote><p>“I believe strongly in the need for accountability, and in the importance of being good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Sebelius said in her announcement.</p></blockquote>
<p>Amazingly enough, it only took Sebelius a few months to come to this new faith. But let&#8217;s put aside Sebelius&#8217; disastrous $600 million Healthcare.con boondoggle.</p>
<p>How <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/362399/one-mistake-putting-cms-charge-whole-obamacare-project-veronique-de-rugy">good of a steward of taxpayer money i</a>s she?</p>
<blockquote><p>Every year, some $70 billion of taxpayers’ money is wasted in Medicare and Medicaid improper payments. For Medicare alone, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and others estimate that nearly 10 percent of the roughly $500 billion in current annual Medicare payments are improper. In fact, the situation is so bad that the GAO has long designated Medicare a high-risk federal program because of its vulnerability to waste, fraud, and abuse. That all takes place under the nose of CMS, which so far has done very little to curb the trend.</p></blockquote>
<p>Oh no! We need an investigation to find out who&#8217;s responsible for this.</p>
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		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Problem: Not Enough Meetings</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamacares-problem-not-enough-meetings/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-problem-not-enough-meetings</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamacares-problem-not-enough-meetings/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 08 Dec 2013 14:12:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212581</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama didn't actually meet with Sebelius. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Obama-Sebelius.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-212582" alt="Obama-Sebelius" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Obama-Sebelius-450x333.jpg" width="450" height="333" /></a></p>
<p>The point here is that <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/12/the-zero-meeting-president-100767.html?ml=m_pm">Obama didn&#8217;t actually meet with Sebelius</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) analysis finds that from July 12, 2010, to Nov. 30, 2013, the president’s public schedule records zero one-on-one meetings between Obama and Sebelius. Equally shocking, over the same period, the president&#8217;s calendar lists 277 private meetings with his other Cabinet secretaries (excluding full Cabinet meetings).</p>
<p>Given these startling findings, and the fact that the White House calendar did not reflect meetings prior to July 12, 2010, GAI researchers then performed a second analysis using another respected recorder of presidential activity, the POLITICO presidential calendar. The results: Just one April 21, 2010 entry was found listing a White House meeting between Obama and Sebelius—and even that was a joint meeting with then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.</p></blockquote>
<p>While Obama should have been meeting with Sebelius considering that she had been given responsibility for his key &#8220;achievement&#8221; it wouldn&#8217;t have actually changed anything.</p>
<p>Higher ups knew that the website wasn&#8217;t working. They chose not to pass the message up to Obama. Or they did pass the message up and are denying it now.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not as if Obama would have sat down for brunch with Sebelius and she would have come out and told him that the website doesn&#8217;t work. If she had been capable of that elementary level of responsibility, the word would have already gone up to senior staffers through other channels.</p>
<p>Obama spends very little time with cabinet members. And that&#8217;s a symptom of a broken workplace culture. But the entire process is a sign of the same broken workplace culture.</p>
<p>This is an administration that is very good at spin and very bad at functionality.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Kathleen Sebelius&#8217;s Mea Culpa Tour</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/kathleen-sebeliuss-mea-culpa-tour/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kathleen-sebeliuss-mea-culpa-tour</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/kathleen-sebeliuss-mea-culpa-tour/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cancel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hearing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[website]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209830</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the public isn't buying it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/kathleen_sebelius_js_605.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209882" alt="kathleen_sebelius_js_605" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/kathleen_sebelius_js_605.jpg" width="224" height="189" /></a>The real-life version of &#8220;Groundhog Day&#8221; moved from the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week to the Senate Finance Committee yesterday, as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/06/Sebelius-faces-lawmakers-anew-on-health-care-law">brought</a> her mea culpa tour to Congress&#8217;s upper chamber. Despite the miserable rollout of President Obama&#8217;s &#8220;signature achievement,&#8221; Sebelius insisted that the <a href="http://healthcare.gov/">healthcare.gov</a> website had improved dramatically, even as she was forced to concede that &#8220;we&#8217;re not there yet&#8221; with regard to full functionality.</p>
<p>Senators from both parties held Sebelius&#8217;s feet to the fire. Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) insisted the HHS Secretary must be &#8220;candidly, fully, totally&#8221; honest with Congress about the repairs, &#8220;so that we don&#8217;t wake up at the end of November and find out we&#8217;re not there yet.&#8221; He <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/06/us-usa-healthcare-delay-idUKBRE9A50PT20131106?feedType=RSS&amp;feedName=healthNews&amp;rpc=451">expressed</a> his disappointment that administration officials never foresaw problems with the website. &#8220;When we asked for updates on the marketplaces, the responses we got were totally unsatisfactory,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case.&#8221;</p>
<p>Baucus knew that was the case long before yesterday. The chief architect of the healthcare bill openly <a href="http://nationalreview.com/corner/363249/baucus-train-wreck-comment-being-twisted-malign-obamacare-andrew-johnson">expressed</a> his reservations to Sebelius at a hearing last April, when he told her he &#8220;saw a huge train wreck coming down.&#8221; That &#8220;train wreck&#8221; line was widely reported. Not so widely reported was Baucus&#8217;s reservations about the contractor hired by Sebelius. &#8220;I&#8217;m just worried that&#8217;s going to be money down the drain,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Baucus was prescient about one of the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/21/technology/obamacare-website-contracts/">six largest</a> contractors involved insetting up the website. HHS <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/">awarded</a> a no-bid contract to CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company. A top executive at CGI, Toni Townes-Whitley, was First Lady Michelle Obama&#8217;s Princeton classmate. Moreover, HHS hired them despite a track record of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362255/obamacares-magical-thinkers-mark-steyn">failure</a> with regard setting up far smaller operational websites in Canada. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) <a href="http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/bill-nelson-tells-sebelius-to-hold-obamacare-contractors-responsible---/2151172">deflected</a> blame away from Sebelius and onto the contractors for the website’s shortcomings. &#8220;I want you to burn their fingers and make `em pay for not being responsible and producing a product that all of us could be proud,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Nelson is aiming at the wrong target. On October 30, Bob Laszewski, who heads a consulting firm for big insurance companies, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/politics/obamacare-white-house-pressure/">contended</a> that the Obama administration is &#8220;exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet&#8221; about the problems associated with the rollout. Despite denials by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, health-care consultant Larry Thompson <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/363161/insurance-executives-speak-out-against-aca-anonymously-eliana-johnson?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter">seconded</a> that assessment, telling National Review that insurance company executives &#8220;are afraid to say anything because they don’t want HHS all over them.”</p>
<p>Last week, House Oversight Committee chairman Darryl Issa (R-CA) was forced to <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57610277/issa-subpoenas-sebelius-for-healthcare.gov-documents/">subpoena</a> Sebelius for documentation regarding the rollout, because she refused to provide it without being forced to do so. And yesterday, Issa unveiled documents obtained from ObamaCare contractors revealing the October rollout was <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/06/documents-show-first-days-of-obamacare-rollout-worse-than-initially-realized/?hpt=hp_t2">far more</a> chaotic than previously reported.</p>
<p>In other words, the &#8220;most transparent administration in history&#8221; is back in stonewalling mode, and Nelson is attempting to obscure where the real blame for this failure should be placed.</p>
<p>Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) blasted Sebelius for the administration&#8217;s &#8220;cavalier attitude,&#8221; and its &#8220;broken promises&#8221; with regard to the millions of Americans who are seeing their insurance plans changed or cancelled. &#8220;More and more promises made at the time this law was passed are now crumbling under the weight of reality on a daily basis,&#8221; he said. “While I am glad that you are accepting responsibility for this disastrous rollout, I would have preferred that you and the rest of the administration were honest with us to begin with.&#8221; Hatch wants Sebelius to update Congress once a month regarding all progress being made. “No more excuses,” he warned her. “No more spin, just give us the truth.”</p>
<p>Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) was equally <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-sebelius-obamacare-delay-20131106,0,1021952.story#axzz2jtHgxYpD">blunt.</a> “The website’s not working, fine. But the law is not working,” he contended. He noted that many Americans will face far higher prices for insurance premiums when the law is fully in effect next year. Sebelius countered that premium prices are 16 percent lower than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated they would be. Yet when Crapo asked the Secretary if that meant prices for insurance would be lower next year compared to this year, Sebelius admitted it did not.</p>
<p>Whether or not the law is working, Sebelius dismissed any possibility it would be delayed. &#8220;Delay is not an option,&#8221; she insisted. &#8220;We are still at the beginning of a six-month open enrollment that ends at the end of March, and there&#8217;s plenty of time to sign up for the new plans.&#8221;</p>
<p>That sentiment runs contrary to the one <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/24/dems-join-call-to-delay-obamacare-mandate-amid-website-failures/">expressed</a> by members of both parties, particularly Democrats up for re-election in 2014. It would appear they are beginning to understand the lethal political liability of a law that may cause as many as <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/31/obama-officials-in-2010-93-million-americans-will-be-unable-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/">93 million</a> Americans to lose their current insurance policies.</p>
<p>Democrats may have gotten even more nervous when Republicans expressed concerns about the security and testing of the website. Staying true to form, Sebelius <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/kathleen-sebelius-obamacare-senate-hearing-99449.html">insisted</a> that administration officials and security consultants saw no reason for delays. “No one suggested the risks outweighed the importance of moving forward,&#8221; she declared. She also <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57611063/sebelius-obamacare-delay-is-not-an-option/">noted</a> that experts have run &#8220;a series of diagnostics, looked at the entire system and determined that <a href="http://HealthCare.gov/">HealthCare.gov</a> is fixable and it isn&#8217;t fatally flawed.&#8221; That would be the same website that <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57611202/departing-obamacare-security-official-didnt-sign-off-on-site-launch/">never</a> received a single end-to-end security test prior to its launch.</p>
<p>Yet the website remains only part of the problem. During questioning by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Sebelius was forced to <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/06/sebelius-back-in-hot-seat-on-capitol-hill-over-rocky-rollout-obamacare/">admit</a> there is nothing in the federal regulations that would prevent a <i>convicted felon</i> from becoming an ObamaCare navigator. “Isn’t it true there is no federal requirement for navigators to undergo a criminal background check, even though they will receive personal information from the individuals they help to sign-up up for the Affordable Care Act?” Cornyn asked. “That is true,” Sebelius replied. “States could have an additional background check and other features, but it is not part of the federal requirement.” Cornyn continued. “So a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them?” Sebelius answered, “This is possible.”</p>
<p>Moving from the possible to the highly probable, yesterday the FBI <a href="http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy-policy/2013/11/05/fbi-gears-up-as-nearly-17m-poised-to-get-obamacare-tax-credits/">revealed</a> that they believe the “potential for crime in health care reform is huge,” including estimates of tax credit fraud projected to surpass $20 billion&#8211;because ObamaCare insurance subsidies will be doled out on the honor system.</p>
<p>The next shoe to drop was Sebelius&#8217;s <a href="http://www.kmbz.com/Sebelius-Obamacare-Sign-Ups-Will-Be-Quite-Low-/17705697">admission</a> that when the administration does release the enrollment figures for ObamaCare, they will be dismal. “The enrollment numbers which we will release next week, which will be the first month of enrollment, are likely to be quite low given that struggles people have had getting access to the site and getting information,” Sebelius conceded. “I’m hoping that with the site improvement we’ll see more robust numbers, but until the site is fully improved and we really kind of open up the doors wide to a lot of people, we’re going to have I think a struggle getting significant numbers to sign up,” she added.</p>
<p>Without significant numbers of enrollments&#8211;<a href="http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/11/05/what-happens-if-young-people-dont-sign-up-for-obamacare/">including</a> at least 2.7 million younger, healthier Americans out of the seven million people the system needs to sign up in year one&#8211;insurance premiums are likely to increase significantly in order to cover the pool of policyholders who are older and unhealthier. Rising premiums will discourage even more younger, healthier people from signing up, especially since the alternative fines are far cheaper. As the process repeats itself, a &#8220;death spiral&#8221; ensues.</p>
<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303661404579178231174626314">According</a> to the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, current enrollees are &#8220;older than expected so far.&#8221; Furthermore, the fallback excuse&#8211;that younger healthier Americans will shy away from the glitchy, federally-run website, while older sicker Americans persevere&#8211;isn&#8217;t holding true. Smoother-running state exchanges are also seeing an ominous signup pattern. In Connecticut and Kentucky, both of which have enrolled more than 4,000 people, those older than 55 comprise the largest segment of ObamaCare enrollees, &#8220;much older than industry actuaries say they had anticipated.&#8221; And while the law contains a provision allowing the government (read: taxpayers) to reimburse insurers for some losses, unless the pool of enrollees meets the right age-related criteria, those reimbursements may not prevent insurers from losing money.</p>
<p>New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have already experienced a death spiral. Like ObamaCare, older, sicker people could not be charged more for coverage than younger, healthier people. As a result, premiums in those states rose to double and triple the national average.</p>
<p>Finally, there was the subject Sebelius was undoubtedly eager to avoid. Several Republicans hammered away at the HHS Secretary regarding the president&#8217;s promise that if you liked your healthcare plan, you could keep your healthcare plan. Like a good soldier, Sebelius <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/kathleen-sebelius-obamacare-hearing-takeaway-more-bad-news-99479_Page2.html">embraced</a> the administration&#8217;s despicable effort to re-write history. “The president’s promise was written into the law from day one, and that was the grandfather clause,” she insisted.</p>
<p>Republican committee members weren&#8217;t buying it. “There weren’t any caveats on that at the time. It’s not like there were any asterisks or footnotes,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD). “We know that lying to Congress is a crime, but unfortunately, lying to the American people is not,” <a href="http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/06/21336093-sebelius-gets-grilled-by-both-democratic-and-gop-senators">said</a> Cornyn. Even Democrat Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) voiced the frustration of  “a couple million people, sadly, who are not going to be able to keep the policies that they want and are facing large increases in premiums.”</p>
<p>Yet is was Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KA) who encapsulated the fears, frustrations and anger felt by the millions of Americans regarding both ObamaCare and the unfettered arrogance of an administration determined to impose their will on the public, irrespective of the disastrous consequences that have ensued:</p>
<blockquote><p>Madame Secretary, you yourself know that this law has serious problems. You delayed over half of the mandate deadlines. You did it for employers, for unions, and for small business, but not for the exchanges&#8230;nor for millions of Americans that are losing their health care..Your main goal should have been to protect Americans, to lessen their risk, and to ensure their safety, but in your zeal to implement this law, not warnings, not advice, not counsel would deter you from implementing the exchanges. You have said America should hold you accountable, which is why today, Madame Secretary, I repeat my request for you to resign.</p></blockquote>
<p>With any luck, the American public will turn that request into a demand.</p>
<p><strong>Don’t miss this week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em>, which exposes <em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/">ObamaCare’s Dirty Little Secret</a></em>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>HHS Secretary: ObamaCare Website Didn&#8217;t Crash, It Just Doesn&#8217;t Work</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/hhs-secretary-obamacare-website-didnt-crash-it-just-doesnt-work/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hhs-secretary-obamacare-website-didnt-crash-it-just-doesnt-work</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/hhs-secretary-obamacare-website-didnt-crash-it-just-doesnt-work/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:46:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HHS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ObamaCare website]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209108</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It didn't crash. You just can't use it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe width="540" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_N6dc41VQwQ?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p><iframe width="540" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/npjOSLCR2hE?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>Kathleen Sebelius&#8217;s Congressional testimony was<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/362587/sebelius-website-has-never-crashed-andrew-johnson"> a masterpiece of hairsplitting</a>. The HHS Secretary explained that the ObamaCare website hadn&#8217;t crashed, <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/30/great-news-from-sebelius-the-website-has-never-crashed/">it was just loading slowly and completely unreliable</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Health and Human Service secretary Kathleen Sebelius claimed under oath today that the federal government’s largely dysfunctional Healthcare.gov website has never crashed, even though the site was down as she testified.</p>
<p>“I would suggest the website has never crashed,” Sebelius said during Wednesday’s House Commerce and Energy Committee hearing. “It is functional, but at a very slow speed and very low reliability, and has continued to function.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The distinction means that a tiny fraction of people have been able to successfully use the website. It&#8217;s a little like saying that 99% of Washington burnt down, not 100%.</p>
<p>Healthcare.gov doesn&#8217;t work&#8230; but it didn&#8217;t crash. At least on their backend. You just can&#8217;t use it. It&#8217;s not a dead website. It&#8217;s just pining for the fjords.</p>
<p>More hairsplitting came when asked about people losing their health insurance plans.</p>
<blockquote><p>Sebelius disputed contentions that people are losing health insurance under the new law. If people get notices of cancellation because their existing insurance was not grandfathered in and does not meet minimum standards, “it’s the law that they must get another plan,” Sebelius said. “Continuing coverage is part of the law, and that wasn’t the case in the past.”</p></blockquote>
<p>They&#8217;re not losing their health insurance, in the sense that it&#8217;s illegal for them not to have health insurance. They&#8217;re losing their good and affordable health insurance and being forced to pay far more for bad high deductible ObamaCare insurance&#8230; that does cover drug abuse, mental problems and maternity for everyone&#8230; including 59 year old women.</p>
<p>Sebelius&#8217; equivocation reminds me of Anatole France&#8217;s &#8220;In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nobody loses health insurance. They just lose health insurance that they can afford to pay for.</p>
<p>Sebelius, trying to explain a nightmare of non-functioning websites and canceled insurance policies, argued that the free market had to go. &#8220;This market has always been the Wild West,” she said. &#8220;The individual insurance market was dysfunctional.&#8221;</p>
<p>Do you know what&#8217;s functional? Individual insurance market websites. Do you know what isn&#8217;t functional? Sebelius&#8217; Healthcare.gov gulag.</p>
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		<title>The Thuggery of Obamacare Czarina Kathleen Sebelius</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michellemalkin/the-thuggery-of-obamacare-czarina-kathleen-sebelius/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-thuggery-of-obamacare-czarina-kathleen-sebelius</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michellemalkin/the-thuggery-of-obamacare-czarina-kathleen-sebelius/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:41:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bully]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coverage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[demonization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[warning]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209051</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration's brass-knuckles approach to keeping ailing businesses in line.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/large.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209052" alt="large" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/large-437x350.jpg" width="306" height="245" /></a>U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is allergic to the truth. She is the ruthless enforcer of Obamacare&#8217;s Jenga tower of lies upon lies upon lies. Now that this fatally flawed government edifice is collapsing, you can expect Sebelius to do what she has done her entire career: blame, bully and pile on more lies.</p>
<p>Three years ago, when insurers and other companies had the audacity to expose Obamacare&#8217;s damage to their customers and workers, Sebelius brought out her brass knuckles. Remember? As I reported at the time, the White House coordinated a demonization campaign against Anthem Blue Cross in California for raising rates because of the new mandate&#8217;s costs. Obama singled out the company in a &#8220;60 Minutes&#8221; interview, and Sebelius sent a nasty-gram demanding that Anthem &#8220;justify&#8221; its rate hikes to the federal government.</p>
<p>A private company trying to survive in the marketplace was forced to &#8220;explain&#8221; itself to federal bureaucrats and career politicians who have never run a business (successful or otherwise) in their lives. Sebelius went even further. She called on Anthem to provide public disclosure of how the rate increases would be spent — a mandate that no other private companies must follow.</p>
<p>In an even more heavy-handed effort to suppress criticism, Sebelius wrote America&#8217;s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national association of health insurers, &#8220;calling on their members to stop using scare tactics and misinformation to falsely blame premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act.&#8221; The threatening cease-and-desist letter commanded: &#8220;I urge you to inform your members that there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases. &#8230; Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections.&#8221;</p>
<p>The speech-stifling gag order declared war on every opponent of Obamacare who dared to question the administration&#8217;s phony claims of cost-savings or expanded access.</p>
<p>When McDonald&#8217;s notified the feds that it might have to cancel health insurance plans for 30,000 workers because of Obamacare&#8217;s effective prohibition on low-cost plans, Sebelius slammed The Wall Street Journal for reporting the story. She then rushed to issue McDonald&#8217;s an Obamacare waiver, the first of thousands to quell criticism and bleeding.</p>
<p>Health care policy analyst Merrill Matthews points out that Sebelius cracked her whip against health insurer Humana even before the law had passed. When the insurer warned seniors that an Obamacare proposal to cut reimbursements could harm their Medicare Advantage benefits and coverage, Sebelius demanded that the company &#8220;suspend potentially misleading mailings to beneficiaries about health care and insurance reform.&#8221;</p>
<p>The warning, of course, proved true. In September 2010, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care canceled MA policies covering 22,000 seniors precisely because of Obamacare rules on reimbursements and MA-style plans.</p>
<p>Sebelius&#8217; power-mad partner on Capitol Hill, Henry Waxman, targeted companies including Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon and ATT in a brass-knuckled effort to silence companies speaking out about the cost implications and financial burdens of Obamacare. After the firms reported write-downs related to the Obamacare mandate (disclosures that are required by law), Waxman scheduled an inquisition hearing to berate them publicly. After the Democrats&#8217; own congressional staff pointed out that the companies &#8220;acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards&#8221; in submitting filings that were required by law, Waxman called off the hounds.</p>
<p>It was a temporary reprieve. Caught with their pants down on the Obamacare website abomination and unable to stifle the cries of millions of Americans who are unable to keep the plans and doctors they like, Sebelius and her corrupt company are now blaming insurers, contractors and customers for the Obama administration&#8217;s ideological mess. In short: They lied, but for your own good. Culture of Corruption 101.</p>
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		<title>The ObamaCare Meltdown</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/obamacare-collapses/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-collapses</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/obamacare-collapses/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Oct 2013 04:54:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coverage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fail]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mandate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[registration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rollout]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[website]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Will the health care overhaul collapse under its own weight? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/pic_giant_102313_SM_Top-Ten-Obamacare-Disasters-to-Come.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208535" alt="pic_giant_102313_SM_Top-Ten-Obamacare-Disasters-to-Come" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/pic_giant_102313_SM_Top-Ten-Obamacare-Disasters-to-Come.jpg" width="310" height="244" /></a>Sometimes politics imitates life.</span></b></p>
<p>It turns out the pregnant, diabetic woman who nearly fainted in President Obama&#8217;s arms at the Obamacare damage-control press event Obama held this week, isn&#8217;t herself <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">sold on</a> Obamacare.</p>
<p>The experience of Californian Karmel Allison is a metaphor for the entire rollout of the healthcare exchanges. Failure after failure, glitch after glitch, and spin, spin, spin. Allison was part of the president&#8217;s embarrassing media event this week in which a few Americans who somehow managed to sign up for Obamacare online were paraded for the dupes of the mainstream media to swoon over.</p>
<p>Allison&#8217;s near-collapse was captured on live TV as she was suffering a dizzy spell. Allison isn&#8217;t sure if she will sign up for Obamacare but the Obama White House wheeled her out in public as an example of someone who needs Obamacare. According to the White House:</p>
<blockquote><p>Karmel Allison was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes when she was nine years old. She has stayed on the same insurance ever since, despite constantly rising costs, for fear she would not be able to find a plan that would cover her due to her pre-existing condition. Allison recently began researching her options on CoveredCA and has publically [sic] described her experience as finally feeling equal to others, including her young and healthy husband, when it comes to access to coverage.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obamacare isn&#8217;t likely to help Allison who reportedly prefers her current coverage. She&#8217;s far from alone as Americans experience sticker shock as their health insurance premiums skyrocket &#8212; assuming they haven&#8217;t had their policies canceled outright.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a Canadian company is <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">taking the blame</a> for the failed architecture of <a href="http://healthcare.gov/">healthcare.gov</a>, the federal Obamacare enrollment website. CGI Federal Inc., the primary contractor on the new website and a subsidiary of Montreal, Quebec-based CGI Inc., is in turn blaming the bunged up Oct. 1 launch of the site on a subcontractor.</p>
<p>CGI also <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">screwed up</a> a Canadian-taxpayer funded project, a federal gun registry. The Canadian government canceled the company&#8217;s contract in 2007 after that country&#8217;s Auditor General determined that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was &#8220;significantly over budget&#8221; and was repeatedly delayed.</p>
<p>The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper that took power in 2006 eventually opposed the gun registry which was later repealed by Parliament.</p>
<p>As Joel B. Pollak notes,</p>
<blockquote><p>In another parallel to the Obamacare controversy in the United States, the gun registry had been passed in 1993 over vehement Conservative objections, and was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000, before finally being repealed in most of the country in 2012.</p></blockquote>
<p>With the Obama White House&#8217;s blessing, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Norman Lear Center, which has something called a &#8220;Hollywood, Health &amp; Society program,&#8221; is helping TV producers <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">condition the masses</a> into supporting Obama&#8217;s sclerotic Soviet-style health care program.</p>
<p>USC will aim to keep producers, writers, and directors up to speed so they can incorporate the latest information into their storylines. It will also generate public service announcements to match the TV shows&#8217; storylines. The program, which also aids in the spread of Al Gore&#8217;s anthropogenic global warming hysteria, <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">boasts</a> that its &#8220;storytelling resources&#8221; have contributed to more than 550 &#8220;Hollywood, Health &amp; Society-assisted storylines over the span of three years.&#8221;</p>
<p>Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a former Kansas governor and lobbyist for vulturous trial lawyers, dove deep last year, swimming with the worst of the bottom-feeders of the activist Left in a quest <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">to recruit fellow thugs</a> from Al Sharpton&#8217;s gang to help con the American people into supporting Obamacare. “We know that the best way to keep moving in the right direction is to get people the facts,&#8221; Sebelius said at the time. &#8220;Right now there are a lot of people who are benefiting from this law who don’t even know that’s why they are benefiting.”</p>
<p>Sebelius has also <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">unleashed</a> the leftovers of the radical crime syndicate ACORN, President Obama&#8217;s ally and former employer, on unsuspecting communities. This means that as you read this article community organizers with a track record for fraud and identity theft are getting their hands on important personal information such as income figures and Social Security numbers of those they convince to sign up for Obamacare.</p>
<p>Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke&#8217;s shady union is helping people enroll in Obamacare exchanges. The United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 100 in New Orleans <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">announced</a> on its Facebook page Sept. 15 that it was gearing up to do mass enrollment of people in the Affordable Care Act exchanges in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. (HHS has made a <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">searchable database</a> of Obamacare navigators available online.)</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s detractors, already accustomed to the president&#8217;s gross bureaucratic mismanagement of, well, everything, are understandably aghast at the breathtaking incompetence of those who managed the website launch.</p>
<p>But so are some of the president&#8217;s staunchest defenders.</p>
<p>Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the Affordable Care Act&#8217;s online debut is &#8220;excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services.&#8221;</p>
<p>The technical snafus that accompanied the rollout of health care exchanges were much larger than mere server issues. &#8220;This was bungled badly,&#8221; Gibbs said. &#8220;This was not a server problem, just too many people came to the website, this is a website architecture problem.&#8221;</p>
<p>Think tank analyst Norman Ornstein, a left-winger who is normally an Obama apologist, <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/22/the-tiny-but-very-important-detail-about-the-woman-who-nearly-fainted-at-the-obamacare-press-conference/">slammed</a> the rollout.</p>
<blockquote><p>To be sure, every major rollout of a new or changed social policy, including Medicare itself, is rough and takes weeks or months to resolve. But this rollout is clearly worse, and, as we learn more about its history over the past six months and more, the failures in vision and execution, in the face of clear and blunt warnings of problems ahead, are striking and troubling.</p></blockquote>
<p>It is clear, Ornstein said, that &#8220;the stark internal warnings from tech experts of deep-seated problems in the programs came months ago and went unheeded.&#8221;</p>
<p>Some conservatives are demanding that HHS Secretary Sebelius fall on her sword for botching the initial six-month implementation phase of the online insurance markets required by the Obamacare law.</p>
<p>This is, of course, a terrible idea. Americans who want to prevent the radical transformation of American society that Obamacare will lead to should do everything they can to keep Sebelius.</p>
<p>Kathleen Sebelius&#8217;s monumental mistakes in implementing Obamacare may be the program&#8217;s downfall. Let&#8217;s hope she continues her fine work.</p>
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		<title>On to the ObamaCare Meltdown</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/on-to-the-obamacare-meltdown/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=on-to-the-obamacare-meltdown</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Oct 2013 04:45:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health and Human Services]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[premium]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[website]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207793</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The beginning of the end? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/MarketplaceWebsite.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-207794" alt="Health Overhaul Florida" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/MarketplaceWebsite-450x326.jpg" width="315" height="228" /></a>There&#8217;s good news and bad news for conservatives in the wake of the deal that reopened the federal government. The bad news is that Americans have once again been offered a lousy package that does nothing to solve the nation&#8217;s out-control spending habits. The good news is that much of the attention the public devoted to the shutdown and the debt ceiling will now be focused on the disaster known as ObamaCare. It is a disaster wholly owned by Democrats.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is one born of unbridled hubris. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her planners were given ample <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304106704579137501568384292">warning</a> by health industry insiders and low-level Obama administration officials that the exchanges had not been properly tested and implementation schedules were not being met, despite having a three year window and hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on building the <a href="http://Healthcare.gov/">Healthcare.gov</a> website. Sebelius ignored those warnings. But telltale signs, such as her ongoing efforts to denigrate critics, as well as her refusal to turn over documents to the HHS inspector general for a routine performance audit, indicated all was not well.</p>
<p>The latter revelation might be telling: the actual money spent setting up the website is almost impossible to determine. According to <i>Reuters</i>, the <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/17/us-usa-healthcare-technology-insight-idUSBRE99G05Q20131017">original cost</a> to build the site was approximately $93.7 million. Yet that total tripled to $292 million when new money was assigned to site construction as late as April. That assignment apparently coincided with warnings from federal and state officials that the information technology on which these online exchanges were based was not working properly.</p>
<p>Yet <i>Reuters</i> may be low-balling the total outlay. On October 10, the website Digital Trends initially reported the price tag was $634 million, but later revised the cost down to $500 million when they were told that they were including data unrelated to the current law. The revised totals included $398 million in obligated contracts for building the website <i>and</i> the technology portion of the Federally Facilitated Exchanges being used in states that decided not to set up their own exchanges. An additional $100 million-plus was reportedly spent on salaries and administrative costs.</p>
<p>George Edwards, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Southern California offered the best explanation for the lack of transparency. “I would be careful about jumping to any conclusions before fully understanding what was included in each contract,” he said. “But I can say that, just as in other industries, as you compress the project schedule, the overall cost increases.”</p>
<p>So do the chances for making mistakes, and the debut of <a href="http://Healthcare.gov/">Healthcare.gov</a> was little more than a series of computer glitches, site crashes, error messages and excruciating delays. Once again displaying her trademark arrogance, Sebelius <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/10/08/major-new-obamacare-glitch-n1719438">contended</a> the reason for the debacle was that &#8220;demand was so high, it exceeded even optimists&#8217; expectations.&#8221; That&#8217;s a remarkable statement, considering every American adult will be required to buy insurance or pay a fine.</p>
<p>Regardless, high demand may not be the problem. Five independent technology experts <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/05/us-usa-healthcare-technology-analysis-idUSBRE99407T20131005">interviewed</a> by <i>Reuters </i>believe the system&#8217;s architecture is flawed, highlighted by the reality that many of the automatic functions emulate what occurs when computer hackers initiate a distributed denial of service (DDOS) that causes malfunctions or an outright crash of a system. HHS <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/326943-more-repairs-planned-for-obamacare-site">twice</a> took the system offline to make repairs, but it still <a href="http://www.wsbt.com/news/local/affordable-care-act-registration-website-still-buggy/-/21046398/22475418/-/rv9kspz/-/index.html">remains</a> buggy.</p>
<p>The most serious bug may not be fixable for years. HHS exchanges are designed to process reports between insurers and the exchanges seven days a week. These &#8220;834 transactions&#8221; are used to track the policies consumers select at the exchanges, along with whatever subsidies they get, and reconcile those lists with the insurers.</p>
<p>Yet the reconciliation process is a debacle unto itself. Industry sources reveal many of the 834s have been rendered unusable to the point where it can be impossible to determine if an individual has insurance or not. Moreover, they predict the problem will get worse as more people sign up.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for the American public, the technical flaws associated with ObamaCare may be the least of their problems. Far more daunting is the &#8220;sticker shock.&#8221; Many Americans have been startled to discover that &#8220;affordable&#8221; health is nothing more than a euphemism as their insurance costs will be <a href="http://www.gopusa.com/news/2013/10/15/sticker-shock-obamacare-deductibles/">double</a> or triple what they previously paid. The Heritage Foundation <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/10/enrollment-in-obamacare-exchanges-how-will-your-health-insurance-fare">compiled</a> the best apples-to-apples comparison of one month insurance rates for adults, ages 27 and 50, as well as a family of four, before and after the implementation of ObamaCare. Each group will see an increase in their premium costs in 45 out of 50 states. For 27 year olds, those increases range from a low of 0.8 percent to a high of 252.5 percent. For 50 year olds, the range is 3.6 percent to 256.5 percent. A family of four will see increases ranging from a low of 0.8 percent to a high of 178.7 percent.</p>
<p>And then there are the deductibles. While the federal limit for out-of-pocket expenses will be $6,350 for an individual and  $12,700 for a family,  ObamaCare deductibles <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/investopedia/2013/10/01/how-to-choose-between-bronze-silver-gold-and-platinum-health-insurance-plans/3/">range</a> from the Bronze plan, covering 60 percent of covered medical expenses, up to the Platinum plan covering 90 percent of covered medical expenses. For Americans who don&#8217;t understand what this means, one&#8217;s plan will pay anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the actual costs incurred for healthcare. The consumer is completely responsible for the remaining costs, plus the cost of the premium. Any expenses not covered by the plan must be paid in full by the consumer.  Thus, &#8220;affordable&#8221; healthcare may be a lot less affordable than most people imagine.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s when people can actually compare prices. According to the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, the Obama administration is deliberately attempting to obscure the actual prices of premiums by showing consumers only their net out-of-pocket premiums with the subsidies already subtracted, &#8220;because those all-in quotes are so much higher than what&#8217;s available on the individual market.&#8221;</p>
<p>There’s another shock awaiting many Americans. According to Bloomberg News, ObamaCare is likely to accelerate a trend whereby hospitals will demand <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-14/patients-pay-before-seeing-doctor-as-deductibles-spread.html">upfront payment</a> for non-emergency care &#8220;because Americans are increasingly on the hook for more of their own medical costs. And once care is provided, it’s often difficult for hospitals to collect.&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, there are going to be a lot of Americans shocked to discover that &#8220;free&#8221; healthcare isn&#8217;t free at all.</p>
<p>There are also serious privacy issues associated with ObamaCare. In August, 13 Governors sent a <a href="http://www.wvago.gov/pdf/Letter%20to%20HHS%20re%20Data%20Privacy_(final%208%2014%2013).pdf">letter</a> to Sebelius outlining their concerns that the HHS &#8220;has failed to adequately protect the privacy of those who will use the assistance program connected with the new healthcare exchanges.&#8221; The House Oversight Committee is also <a href="http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Republican-Staff-Report-on-Navigators.pdf">concerned</a> with the possibility of identity theft, especially with regard to the lack of proper training and/or vetting of healthcare &#8220;navigators.&#8221; And then there&#8217;s this sentence <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-source-code-no-reasonable-expectation-privacy_762489.html">buried</a> in the source code for the <a href="http://Heathcare.gov/">Heathcare.gov</a> website: &#8220;You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system.&#8221;</p>
<p>Administration officials, and their <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacares-useful-idiots/">useful idiot</a> supporters in the media, continue to insist that all is well with the rollout. But considering this administration&#8217;s penchant for &#8220;spiking the football&#8221; whenever they do something they consider a success, it is telling that Sebelius refuses to reveal any data about how many people have actually <i>signed up</i> for a plan. The &#8220;most transparent administration in history&#8221; claims it will make the figures available sometime in November. “We will release monthly data when it is available,” a senior administration official <a href="http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/07/obama-administration-no-obamacare-enrollment-numbers-until-november-at-earliest-volume-is-problem-on-website/">told</a> CNN. “We have not given an exact date, but it will be after end of month and we will work with states to collect their data to have a good picture of what&#8217;s happening across the country.”</p>
<p>The critical data involves how many younger Americans have signed up. As of now only a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start-signs-of-trouble-at-health-portal.html?pagewanted=2&amp;smid=tw-share&amp;_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;">minuscule percentage</a> of the 14.6 million people of every age who have visited the website have actually signed up for a plan. The administration <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/11/obamacare-needs-young-people-to-sign-up-and-it-looks-like-theyre-starting/">estimates</a> it needs 7 million new enrollees of which 2.7 are between the ages of  18 and 35 to make the plan viable. If the pool is skewed towards old and sicker Americans, a &#8220;death spiral&#8221; begins: insurers will lose money this year, forcing them to sharply raise premium prices next year. Higher premiums will be even less attractive to younger healthier Americans who are already getting a raw deal, so they will drop out in greater numbers, causing another increase in premiums. If this vicious cycle can&#8217;t be broken, ObamaCare collapses.</p>
<p>The ingredient progressives are forever missing the boat on? Human nature. While older sicker Americans might be inclined to move heaven and earth to obtain health insurance, young Americans, whose <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/1001/Obamacare-101-What-to-know-if-you-opt-out-of-buying-health-insurance">alternative</a> for 2014 is a $95 fine or one percent of one&#8217;s income, which ever is higher, might be more than willing to blow it off. For perspective sake, imagine a twenty-something faced with a choice of paying for an insurance premium he may never use&#8211;or using the money to pay for his iPhone bill.</p>
<p>Money that might be scarce regardless. Investors Business Daily has compiled a daunting <a href="http://news.investors.com/politics/101713-669013-obamacare-employer-mandate-a-list-of-cuts-to-work-hours-jobs.htm">list</a> of the &#8220;job actions with strong proof that ObamaCare&#8217;s employer mandate is behind cuts to work hours or staffing levels.&#8221; As yesterday it included 351 employers.</p>
<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s no widespread evidence that the Affordable Care Act is hurting jobs,&#8221; <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/09/26/obama-claims-no-widespread-evidence-health-law-hurts-jobs-amid-cutbacks/">said</a> President Obama in September. A full-time employee, defined as someone who works 30 or more hours a week, must be covered by ObamaCare. A part time employee does not have to be covered.  In 2013, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/part-time-job-creation_n_3788365.html">75 percent</a> of the jobs created were part-time. No doubt the president and his followers believe it&#8217;s just a coincidence. A train wreck, in large part caused by ObamaCare, is more like it.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Health Secretary: Amnesty Needed to Completely Bankrupt Obamacare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/health-secretary-amnesty-needed-to-completely-bankrupt-obamacare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=health-secretary-amnesty-needed-to-completely-bankrupt-obamacare</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:31:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[amnesty for illegal aliens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Since Obamacare is already overdrawn, throwing 12 million more people who are low income "high consumers" of medical services will make it even more unworkable faster.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Kathleen-Sebelius22.gif"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-110396" alt="Kathleen-Sebelius22" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Kathleen-Sebelius22-300x200.gif" width="300" height="200" /></a></p>
<p>That&#8217;s not what she actually said, instead HHS Secretary and <a href="http://weaselzippers.us/2013/08/23/sebelius-pass-amnesty-to-boost-obamacare-enrollment/">Obamacare Czar Sebelius told a Latino</a> group that amnesty <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/sebelius-pass-immigration-bill-boost-obamacare-enrollment">would help fill out the ranks</a> of Obamacare.</p>
<blockquote><p>Asked Thursday if the Affordable Care Act will help &#8220;undocumented individuals,&#8221; Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said no &#8212; and that&#8217;s why immigration reform is so important:</p>
<p>&#8220;Well, the (Obamacare) bill is crafted in such a way that those who are undocumented will not have access to the tax credits or shopping in the (health insurance) marketplace. That has been limited, which is, frankly, why &#8212; another very keen reason why we need comprehensive immigration reform,&#8221; Sebelius told a gathering of Latinos in Philadelphia.</p></blockquote>
<p>Since Obamacare is already overdrawn, throwing 12 million more people who are low income &#8220;high consumers&#8221; of medical services will make it even more unworkable faster.</p>
<p>But if your goal is to collapse health care into Single Payer then a flood of illegals might be just what the Obamacare donkey needs.</p>
<blockquote><p>Sebelius recommended that illegal aliens continue to get medical treatment at community health centers, where they will find federally funded, &#8220;culturally competent&#8221; health care providers &#8220;who actually speak the language and can reach out to a neighborhood.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Funded by taxpayers who struggle to pay for their own healthcare.</p>
<blockquote><p>She also noted that the Obama administration has doubled the size of the Public Health Service Corps &#8212; &#8220;which, to me, is one of the great, well-kept secrets in America. It&#8217;s like the Peace Corps for health workers,&#8221; she said.</p>
<p>&#8220;What we find is that when people actually take up service in the National Health Service Corps, they stay in the communities that they are serving long beyond their assignments. So there will be continued access for undocumented,&#8221; Sebelius promised.</p></blockquote>
<p>So many well-kept secrets.</p>
<blockquote><p>Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who joined Sebelius at the event, also addressed the issue of &#8220;dealing with folks who may not have all their documentation in order.&#8221; -</p></blockquote>
<p>Don&#8217;t have all their documentation in order. Is that what we&#8217;re calling it now?</p>
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		<title>List of 10 Most Corrupt Politicians in Washington Includes 4 Obama Cabinet Members</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/list-of-10-most-corrupt-politicians-in-washington-includes-4-obama-cabinet-members/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=list-of-10-most-corrupt-politicians-in-washington-includes-4-obama-cabinet-members</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jan 2013 19:27:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Attorney General Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fast and Furious]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Secretary Steven Chu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Solyndra]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=171801</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You have to admit that Obama Inc. is nothing if not ambitious. Some administrations would be satisfied with having only one member of its cabinet show up on the list of the ten most corrupt politicians in government. But Obama Inc doesn't give up until it scores four of the spots. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/list-of-10-most-corrupt-politicians-in-washington-includes-4-obama-cabinet-members/lineup-717775/" rel="attachment wp-att-171802"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-171802" title="lineup-717775" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/lineup-717775-450x290.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="290" /></a></p>
<p>You have to admit that Obama Inc. is nothing if not ambitious. Some administrations would be satisfied with having only one member of its cabinet show up on the list of the ten most corrupt politicians in government. But Obama Inc doesn&#8217;t give up until it scores four of the spots. Or five.</p>
<p>Judicial Watch&#8217;s list of Washington’s “<a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-announces-list-of-washingtons-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-for-2012/">Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians</a>” for the year includes politicians from both parties, but it includes four cabinet members;</p>
<blockquote><p>Attorney General Eric &#8220;We need to have a serious conversation about all the guns we&#8217;re shipping to druglords&#8221; Holder, Hillary &#8220;Benghazigate&#8221; Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen &#8220;What&#8217;s the Law&#8221; Sebelius and Secretary of Energy Steven “The final decisions on Solyndra were mine” Chu.</p>
<p>Attorney General Eric Holder</p>
<p>Fast and Furious was a reckless DOJ/Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “gun-running” scheme in which guns were sold to Mexican drug cartels and others, apparently in the hope that the guns would end up at crime scenes. Well, they did – and it appears that the guns were involved in the deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens, as well as the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, who was killed in a shootout with Mexican criminals in December 2010.</p>
<p>Holder became the first attorney general in history to be cited for criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to divulge documents about DOJ lies to Congress about Fast and Furious.</p>
<p>Secretary of Energy Steven Chu:</p>
<p>“The final decisions on Solyndra were mine,” said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Oversight Committee on November 17, 2011. And this should be his political epitaph. Chu’s decision to pour $528 million tax dollars into a failing green energy boondoggle that went belly-up in 2011 is indefensible and corrupt, especially in light of the fact that Solyndra’s key investor (Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser) also happens to be a major Obama campaign donor.</p>
<p>Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice:</p>
<p>Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice lied about the events surrounding the Benghazi massacre. Hillary Clinton, the only First Lady to have been the subject of a grand jury investigation, is a regular visitor to our Most Corrupt list, while this is a first-time appearance for Ms. Rice.</p>
<p>Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius</p>
<p>On September 12, 2012, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius became the first member of the President’s cabinet in U.S. history to have been found guilty of violating the Hatch Act when she campaigned for the reelection of Barack Obama in her official capacity of Secretary of HHS.</p></blockquote>
<p>And there&#8217;s a surprise appearance from a fifth fellow who spends a lot of time on TV</p>
<blockquote><p>Barack Obama:</p>
<p>Were there a “Hall of Fame” for broken promises, here is one that would get in on the first ballot: “Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency” (President Barack Obama, January 21, 2009). Instead of transparency and the rule of law over the past four years, we have witnessed the greatest expansion of government in modern political history and, consequently, an explosion of government secrecy, scandals, and abuses of power.</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Muslim Religious Freedom vs. Catholic Religious Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/muslim-religious-freedom-vs-catholic-religious-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-religious-freedom-vs-catholic-religious-freedom</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/muslim-religious-freedom-vs-catholic-religious-freedom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:25:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birth control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cairo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[catholics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mandate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=147590</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration's selective interpretation of religious liberty.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/muslim-religious-freedom-vs-catholic-religious-freedom/0522-birthcont_full_600/" rel="attachment wp-att-147603"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-147603" title="0522-birthcont_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/0522-birthcont_full_600.gif" alt="" width="315" height="237" /></a>In his June 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, President Obama declared that “it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit.” However, when it comes to Catholics and other persons of faith who object to being forced to pay for their employees&#8217; birth control against their core religious convictions, Obama&#8217;s answer is that they are to practice their religion as he sees fit.</p>
<p>On the campaign trail, Obama proudly points to his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Obamacare regulation requiring virtually all health-care plans to provide women with cost-free sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.</p>
<p>At a rally in Virginia last week, for example, Obama must have been summoning the spirit of Georgetown Law School graduate and free birth control activist Sandra Fluke with whom Obama campaigned last August on this very same issue and who spoke at the Democratic National Convention.</p>
<p>Obama told his Virginia audience on October 5th that the Obamacare regulation mandating free contraception for female college students was one of the reasons &#8220;why we passed this law.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;And we are going to keep it,&#8221; Obama vowed.</p>
<p>We can expect the issue to be raised in the upcoming debates, as the Obama campaign tries to get its mojo back with its shopworn &#8220;war on women&#8221; argument.</p>
<p>Obama argues that women must remain in charge of their own bodies, and that the Republicans are trying everything they can to take this right away by seeking to deny women access to birth control pills and the like. The claim is another typical Obama red herring, which sets up a false target with a misstatement of the other side&#8217;s position and then shoots it down.</p>
<p>Obama said during his Virginia rally that no boss, insurance company or government official should &#8220;control&#8221; what health care a person gets.  He must have forgotten about his own rationing board of fifteen unelected bureaucrats, known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board,  which will be doing precisely that for senior citizens dependent on Medicare.</p>
<p>Even more to the point, access to birth control pills and other means of contraception are already ubiquitous and inexpensive. Obama is really arguing for something else. His regulation is all about mandating that someone who is religiously opposed to contraception, sterilization and abortifacients be forced to subsidize someone else&#8217;s decision to purchase and use them for birth control purposes.</p>
<p>Obama defended the mandate as a cost-saving measure in general terms. Last March, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was much blunter. She told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health that the Obamacare HHS mandate would save money because the &#8220;reduction in the number of pregnancies is&#8211;compensates for the cost of contraception.&#8221;</p>
<p>Whether or not Sebelius is right on the pure cost-benefit economic analysis, her defense of the HHS mandate goes to the heart of the objections made by those who, on religious grounds, resist being forced to pay for someone else&#8217;s decision to prevent a new life from coming into being.</p>
<p>The Obama administration says not to worry.  The regulation, they argue, provides an exemption for &#8220;religious employers&#8221; and was modified to make the health insurance carriers for religiously affiliated employers, such as hospitals and universities, reimburse employees directly for their contraception, sterilization and abortifacient expenses.</p>
<p>Not so fast.  A &#8220;religious employer&#8221; qualifying for exemption from the regulation, according to the HHS, means employers who, among other things, must hire and serve primarily those of their own faith. That narrow definition would not apply to ministries of service to the poor, the homeless, the sick, the students in religiously affiliated schools and universities, and others in need. As the Administrative Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops put it in a statement it issued last March on religious freedom: &#8220;Those deemed by HHS not to be &#8216;religious employers&#8217; will be forced by government to violate their own teachings within their very own institutions.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Obama administration thought it could solve this problem through a sleight of hand. Let the religiously affiliated organizations such as hospitals and universities off the hook in having to make direct payments for their employees&#8217; birth control treatments, but require their insurance carriers to do so instead.  However, the truth is that religiously affiliated organizations would still be paying the insurance premiums that support these mandated reimbursements. And some organizations self-insure, which means that they would remain the direct payers.</p>
<p>Providing an insurance plan that does not include the mandated coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients would subject the religiously affiliated employer to exorbitant penalties of $100 per day per employee. A Catholic university or hospital with tens or hundreds of employees would face potentially millions of dollars in fines per year, forcing many to close as the price of sticking to their religious beliefs. The employees could end up losing both their jobs and their health insurance coverage. University students and hospital patients will lose invaluable services, all because women like Sandra Fluke insist on free birth control at someone else&#8217;s expense.</p>
<p>I go back to President Obama&#8217;s declaration to the Muslim world that “it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit.”  Obama went beyond this general statement.  In the same speech, he apologized to the Muslim world that his country’s “rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.”  Obama then promised to change all that: “I&#8217;m committed to work with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat [the Islamic duty of charitable contributions].”</p>
<p>Interestingly, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a large U.S. Islamic “charity” set up expressly to accept zakat, was convicted in 2008 by a federal jury for giving more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas. Perhaps Obama simply forgot that all those tough rules on charitable giving have existed for a good reason – to prevent such front groups posing as “charities” from funneling donations to terrorists.  In any case, he is willing to give Islamic charities the benefit of the doubt and ease the rules on zakat so that Muslims can practice Islam &#8220;as they see fit.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Obama administration also went to court to force a public school district to allow one of its teachers &#8211; a Muslim woman &#8211; to take a special three-week unpaid leave during the school year in order to partake in the annual Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. Never mind the burden on the school, which would have to scramble to find suitable substitute teachers during the three week period. Never mind that such pilgrimages are required of Muslims only once in their lifetimes if they can make it.  The teacher did not have to make the pilgrimage that particular year. Also, never mind that the pilgrimage to Mecca lasts only five days, not the three weeks she asked for.  The school district settled rather than continue to incur escalating legal fees to defend its position. The right of the Muslim teacher to practice Islam as she saw fit was vindicated by the Obama administration.</p>
<p>Why are Muslims given such special accommodations, while Catholics and other persons of faith are being forced into an untenable position by the HHS mandate as they try to practice their religion as they see fit? Either they must give up doing good works through their religiously affiliated organizations or violate their core religious belief in the sanctity of life in order to comply with the HHS sterilization, contraception and abortion-inducing drug payment mandate.</p>
<p>The Obama administration is not only abridging the First Amendment right of free exercise of religious beliefs by virtue of the HHS mandate.  It is engaging in blatant religious discrimination by not making the sort of far-reaching accommodations it extends to Muslims.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Yes, Romney&#8217;s Welfare Ad Is Accurate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/yes-romneys-welfare-ad-is-accurate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=yes-romneys-welfare-ad-is-accurate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/yes-romneys-welfare-ad-is-accurate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2012 04:35:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[campaign]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gut]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work requirement]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142106</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Respected left-wing figures who agree with the ad are curiously being ignored by the Left. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/100818_mitt_romney_ap_328.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-142157" title="100818_mitt_romney_ap_328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/100818_mitt_romney_ap_328.gif" alt="" width="375" height="264" /></a>Poor Mickey Kaus. He&#8217;s the liberal intellectual (not an oxymoron &#8212; he&#8217;s the last known living &#8220;liberal intellectual&#8221;) lefties on TV are usually stealing from, but now that this welfare reform maven has concluded that Romney&#8217;s welfare ad is basically correct, liberals refuse to acknowledge his existence.</p>
<p>The non-Fox media have formed a solid front in denouncing Romney&#8217;s welfare ad for daring to point out that Obama has gutted the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform bill.</p>
<p>The New York Times claims that Romney&#8217;s ad &#8220;falsely&#8221; charges Obama with eliminating work requirements. CNN rates the ad &#8220;false.&#8221; Underemployed hack Howard Fineman says Romney&#8217;s ad &#8220;is just flat out wrong on the facts&#8221; and &#8220;that every fair analyst, every fact checker&#8221; has said it&#8217;s &#8220;just factually wrong.&#8221;</p>
<p>When a campaign ad induces this much hysteria, you know Romney has struck gold. On closer examination, it turns out that by &#8220;every fair analyst,&#8221; Fineman means a bunch of liberals quoting one another.</p>
<p>This is how the media&#8217;s &#8220;fact checkers&#8221; operate when it comes to a Republican campaign ad. One not very well-informed person (or a heavily biased person) announces that Romney&#8217;s welfare ad is false, and the rest of the herd quote him, without anyone ever bothering to examine the facts, much less citing anyone who knows what he&#8217;s talking about.</p>
<p>It is striking that everyone who actually knows something about the 1996 welfare reform law says that Romney&#8217;s ad is accurate.</p>
<p>One of the principal authors of the 1996 welfare reform, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, and Douglas Besharov, who advised Hillary Clinton on the 1996 welfare reform law, say Romney&#8217;s ad is accurate.</p>
<p>Andrew Grossman, also of Heritage, produced something the MSM &#8220;fact checkers&#8221; avoid: a specific and detailed explanation of how the new waivers will allow states to evade the work requirements.</p>
<p>Even Ron Haskins, one of the reform bill&#8217;s authors now at the liberal Brookings Institution &#8212; cited far and wide for &#8220;blasting&#8221; Romney&#8217;s ad &#8212; doesn&#8217;t deny the Obama administration plans to waive the work requirements. He just says he supports waivers for &#8220;job training.&#8221; That&#8217;s not disputing the accuracy of Romney&#8217;s ads.</p>
<p>A lot of Americans don&#8217;t support waiving the work requirements, even for &#8220;job training.&#8221; Mitt Romney thinks they should know that that&#8217;s what Obama is doing.</p>
<p>And liberal Kaus &#8212; whom liberal hacks are usually plagiarizing from &#8212; has written a series of blog posts explaining in detail why the Times is wrong and Romney&#8217;s ad is not incorrect. True, he says the ad is &#8220;oversimplified,&#8221; but I think most people grasp that a 30-second ad will not provide the lush analytical detail of a Kausfiles blog posting.</p>
<p>We know liberals are reading Kausfiles; why aren&#8217;t they stealing from him this time?</p>
<p>As Kaus explains, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius has interpreted the welfare law to allow her to waive work requirements &#8220;subject only to her opinion&#8221; as to what will serve the purposes of the law.</p>
<p>By viewing the work requirements as optional, subject to her waiver, Kaus says, the law has been &#8220;altered dramatically&#8221;: &#8220;Old system: Congress writes the requirements, which are &#8230; requirements. New system: Sebelius does what she wants &#8212; but, hey, you can trust her!&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Ending Welfare As We Know It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/ending-welfare-as-we-know-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ending-welfare-as-we-know-it</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/ending-welfare-as-we-know-it/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jul 2012 04:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bureaucracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health and Human Services]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare reform]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=137442</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama once again attempts to grow the culture of dependency through bureaucratic tyranny.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/obama-clinton_1017805i1.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-137479" title="obama-clinton_1017805i" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/obama-clinton_1017805i1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="242" /></a>Last Thursday, in another assault on the democratic process that has become standard operating procedure for the Obama administration, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a <a href="http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/policy/im-ofa/2012/im201203/im201203.html">policy directive</a> that purports to grant states more &#8220;flexibility&#8221; in implementing the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. In reality, the policy change <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2012/07/12/obama-guts-welfare-reform/">eviscerates</a> the federal works requirements that were the essential ingredient of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act signed into law by president Bill Clinton in 1996 after painstaking, bipartisan efforts achieved through the democratic process.</p>
<p>&#8220;President Obama just tore up a basic foundation of the welfare contract,&#8221; Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/13/republicans-accuse-hhs-gutting-welfare-reform-with-quiet-policy-change/">said</a> in a statement. Jordan also characterized the move as a &#8220;blatant violation of the law.&#8221; What Jordan is referring to is a claim by the administration that the traditional TANF work requirements can be waived or overridden by a legal device called the section 1115 waiver authority under the Social Security law. &#8220;Therefore, HHS is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families,&#8221; the directive states.</p>
<p>Yet the &#8220;mandatory work requirements&#8221; in TANF are not listed under section 1115. They are contained in section 407 of the law, precisely because Congress wanted to shield them from HHS bureaucrats. One section of the law is waivable under section 1115. That is section 402, which requires states to notify the HHS about how they will comply with the other sections of the TANF. As the Heritage Foundation points out, waivers granted under section 402 only apply to the <em>reporting</em> requirements, not the essential parameters of the requirements themselves. The administration&#8217;s sleight-of-hand? Since work requirements of section 407 are <em>mentioned</em> in section 402, all them can be re-written at will by HHS and/or state bureaucrats.</p>
<p>The directive asserts that alternative plans could &#8220;combine learning and work&#8221; to fulfill the work requirement, or let &#8220;vocational educational training or job search /readiness programs&#8221; count as well. In the past, some states have attempted to claim that activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and getting bed rest constitute &#8220;work.&#8221; Such attempts were shot down by the law as it was written. Under the guise of giving states more flexibility, the Obama administration has taken what Bill Clinton himself <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/opinion/22clinton.html?_r=1">described</a> in a 2006 <em>New York Times</em> editorial as &#8220;welfare legislation shifting the emphasis from dependence to empowerment&#8221; and turned it on its ear.</p>
<p>&#8220;On Aug. 22, 1996, after vetoing two earlier versions, I signed welfare reform into law,&#8221; Clinton wrote. &#8220;At the time, I was widely criticized by liberals who thought the work requirements too harsh and conservatives who thought the work incentives too generous. Three members of my administration ultimately resigned in protest. Thankfully, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans voted for the bill because they thought we shouldn&#8217;t be satisfied with a system that had led to intergenerational dependency.&#8221;</p>
<p>By any reasonable measure, the law was a smashing <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_welfare_reform.html">success</a>. In 1994, there were 5.1 million families on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFCDC), the program that preceded TANF. Ten years later, the number had shrunk to 2 million, representing a 60 percent decline. The poverty rate for single women with children fell from 42 percent in 1996, to 34 percent in 2002, marking the first time the number had ever declined below 40 percent. Hunger among children, especially black children, along with the number of welfare caseloads, was <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2003/02/the-continuing-good-news">cut in half</a> by 2003. As Bill Clinton notes, as a result of the Welfare to Work Partnership, &#8220;which my administration started to speed the transition to employment, more than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients. Welfare reform has proved a great success, and I am grateful to the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Community Organizers Mobilize to Save ObamaCare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/community-organizes-mobilize-to-save-obamacare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=community-organizes-mobilize-to-save-obamacare</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/community-organizes-mobilize-to-save-obamacare/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:55:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al sharpton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=129305</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama administration enlists one of America’s leading economic terrorist groups.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/al-sharpton-ii.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-129307" title="al-sharpton-ii" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/al-sharpton-ii.gif" alt="" width="375" height="259" /></a>The Obama administration has enlisted one of America’s leading economic terrorist groups to help defend and promote the president’s widely unpopular socialist healthcare scheme.</p>
<p>This development is not all that surprising because when liberal policies threaten to destroy the country Democrats typically think all they need to do is shout louder to make people understand how wonderful the hated policies really are. This ongoing collaboration with radical left-wing community organizers is also part of the Obama reelection campaign’s divide-and-conquer strategy: Inflame the base and attack opponents relentlessly to draw the public’s attention away from the worsening economy.</p>
<p>In a spectacle that ought to nauseate decent Americans, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius supplicated before Rev. Al Sharpton’s radical left-wing National Action Network (NAN) at its annual convention in the nation’s capital last week. She urged activists at the fancy corporate-sponsored confab to get into the trenches and fight for the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) and to let their neighbors know that the law gives them access to mountains of taxpayer-funded freebies.</p>
<p>“In our country what we know is healthcare inequality [has been] one of the most persistent forms of injustice but over the past three years, as Rev. Sharpton reminded us, we have begun to turn the tide,” Sebelius said. “Now is not the time to turn back.”</p>
<p>“We know that the best way to keep moving in the right direction is to get people the facts. Right now there are a lot of people who are benefiting from this law who don’t even know that’s why they are benefiting.”</p>
<p>“We need your help,” the former Kansas governor said. “I’m delighted to be your partner in that effort.” Sebelius, named by <em>Forbes</em> as the 13th most powerful woman in the world by virtue of her post at HHS, virtually runs the federal Leviathan. The proposed fiscal 2013 budget for HHS is a staggering $941 billion. If Obamacare isn’t killed HHS could devour most of the federal budget in the not-too-distant future.</p>
<p>Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, director of coverage policy in the Office of Health Reform (OHR) at HHS, reinforced her boss’s message. In an interview at the conference she said groups like NAN, National Council of La Raza, and the newly rebranded ACORN spinoffs should sing the praises of Obamacare all across the fruited plain.</p>
<p>“So much of this is about educating people and making sure they know what’s in the Affordable Care Act and understanding what it means for them,” said Brooks-LaSure, a former Democratic staffer on the House Ways &amp; Means Committee. “And that is the key to making sure that people understand just how important the law is, to making sure that we improve our healthcare system.”</p>
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		<slash:comments>38</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Communism By Insurance Mandate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/communism-by-insurance-mandate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=communism-by-insurance-mandate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/communism-by-insurance-mandate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:37:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[catholics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Contraception]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=122617</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How leftists use "insurance" to enforce policies that Americans would never vote for.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Pres1.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122630" title="Pres" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Pres1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="245" /></a></p>
<p>One theory for why Barack Obama pushed the contraception mandate right now is that it helps Rick Santorum. Others theorize it&#8217;s because Obama is an anti-religious bigot with a left-wing agenda. Reasonable minds can disagree on this.</p>
<p>But it may end up helping Mitt Romney by reminding people that the &#8220;individual mandate&#8221; is the least of the problems with ObamaCare. (The &#8220;individual mandate&#8221; is simply the legal argument for why ObamaCare is unconstitutional in a country that has accepted Social Security and Medicare as constitutional.)</p>
<p>This isn&#8217;t a Catholic issue or even a religious issue. Conservatives are falling into the Democrats&#8217; trap by denouncing it as such. It&#8217;s a freedom issue. (Or, as Democrats call it, &#8220;the F-word.&#8221;)</p>
<p>If liberals like it, it&#8217;s subsidized; if they don&#8217;t, it&#8217;s prohibited. And now they can impose their left-wing authoritarianism on the entire country by calling their mandates and prohibitions &#8220;insurance.&#8221;</p>
<p>Liberal fundamentalists say: <em>I don&#8217;t see why anyone needs to hunt; I don&#8217;t know why anyone needs to eat meat; I don&#8217;t see why anyone needs to bathe every day; I don&#8217;t know why anyone minds looking at urine in a low-flow toilet; I don&#8217;t know why anyone needs an incandescent light bulb &#8230;</em></p>
<p>Screw you, liberals. I don&#8217;t know why anyone needs an abortion, free contraception, crap-ass &#8220;art&#8221; with photos of vaginas on the Virgin Mary, non-farming farmers or a $1 million pension for Anthony Weiner.</p>
<p>But I&#8217;m forced to subsidize all of that.</p>
<p>And now we&#8217;re all going to be forced to subsidize the entire wish list of the Berkeley City Council, recast as &#8220;health insurance.&#8221;</p>
<p>Insurance is not supposed to be for normal expenses in the ordinary course of events, such as multivitamins, house painting or oil changes. Insurance is for unexpected catastrophes: fires, accidents, cancer.</p>
<p>The basic idea is to spread the risk of unforeseen disasters. Filling up your gas tank, for example, is not an unforeseen disaster (though it&#8217;s getting to be under Obama).</p>
<p>So why is birth control covered by insurance? Birth control pills aren&#8217;t that expensive &#8212; generics are about $20 a month &#8212; nor is the need for them a bolt out of the blue. Why not have health insurance cover manicures, back massages, carrot cake and nannies?</p>
<p>Liberals huffily ask why it&#8217;s so important to the Catholic Church not to pay for insurance plans that cover birth control, but the better question is: Why is it so important to liberals to force them to? (Wait until they have to buy coverage for vibrating butt-plugs!)</p>
<p>The answer is: They want the government giving official sanction to birth control and, later, abortion. That comes next. They want it for same reason gays want gay marriage &#8212; it&#8217;s purely symbolic.</p>
<p>Following Betty Friedan, gender feminists believe the pill is so central to what we are as a nation that it must be paid for by all, i.e. by insurance. The argument for fully subsidized abortions will be: We don&#8217;t vote on a basic human right!</p>
<p>Whether or not it&#8217;s a &#8220;right,&#8221; it&#8217;s not an area for &#8220;insurance.&#8221; Abortion is an elective procedure. No families are going bankrupt because they had to pay for an abortion &#8212; which costs about as much as a haircut for John Edwards or Bill Clinton. Can&#8217;t we limit the health insurance we are all required by federal law to purchase to financially ruinous, actual medical problems?</p>
<p>No, that is not in the cards. Just as liberals have turned the Constitution into a vehicle for achieving all the left-wing policies they could never get Americans to vote for, now they are going to use &#8220;insurance&#8221; for the same purpose. Their new method doesn&#8217;t even require them to get votes from five justices on the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>The secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, will do it all on her own.</p>
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		<slash:comments>28</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Shredding Kathleen Sebelius</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/michellemalkin/shredding-kathleen-sebelius/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=shredding-kathleen-sebelius</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/michellemalkin/shredding-kathleen-sebelius/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:05:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kansas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Planned Parenthood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[statutory rape]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=110394</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Protecting a system that allows the rapists of underaged girls to avoid authorities.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Kathleen-Sebelius22.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-110396" title="Kathleen-Sebelius22" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Kathleen-Sebelius22.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p>If a private health insurer had engaged in the kind of criminal obstruction that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been tied to in her home state of Kansas, it would be a federal case. Instead, it&#8217;s a non-story in the Washington press. Nothing to see here. Move along.</p>
<p>On Monday, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. World Magazine, a Christian news publication, reported on new bombshell court filings showing that Kansas health officials &#8220;shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces.&#8221; World Magazine reported: &#8220;The health department failed to disclose that fact for six years, until it was forced to do so in the current felony case over whether it manufactured client records.&#8221;</p>
<p>The records are at the heart of the fraud case against Planned Parenthood. Kansas health bureaucrats now shrug that the destruction of these key documents — which they sheepishly admitted had &#8220;certain idiosyncrasies&#8221; — was &#8220;routine.&#8221; Who oversaw the agency accused of destroying the evidence six years ago? Sebelius.</p>
<p>As governor of Kansas, Sebelius fought transparency motions in the proceedings tooth and nail for years. Prosecutors allege a long-running heinous cover-up to manufacture false records of patients who had late-term abortions — and to whitewash Planned Parenthood&#8217;s systemic failures to report child rape.</p>
<p>Former GOP state Attorney General Phill Kline&#8217;s investigation turned up massive discrepancies in reported child rape statistics compared to Planned Parenthood and the late late-term abortionist George Tiller&#8217;s bogus claims. Planned Parenthood of Overland Park and Tiller together performed abortions on 166 girls aged 14 and under and only reported one each to authorities. So, 164 cases of underage rape or statutory rape went unreported and were not investigated by authorities.</p>
<p>Where is Joe Biden to decry actual rape atrocities and Nancy Pelosi to decry dire hazards to women&#8217;s health when we need them?</p>
<p>A Kansas district judge found probable cause of criminality in the abortion providers&#8217; records; another district judge found probable cause to believe Planned Parenthood committed 107 criminal acts.</p>
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