In between all this crap in October: the government shutdown, debt ceiling, Miley Cyrus’s barenaked ass, Kris Jenner separating from a Madame Tussaud’s figure, Ted Cruz, Kim Kardashian’s barenaked ass, Gravity, and my barenaked ass (month’s not over!) it seems like people have forgotten about Obamacare.
It’s the Tara Reid of legislation: rammed through hard, desperate, wasteful, reliant on handouts, and ultimately disease-riddled.
First of all, the website where you can log on and apply for has allowed around approximately five people total to sign up. Or maybe it’s just the same old lady who keeps clicking “Submit” *cue 54-year-old Ida Greenberg stabbing furiously at her mouse: ‘I WILL get healthcare goddammit!’*
No, seriously: in Delaware (home of Joe Biden, despair, nothing else), after hundreds of thousands of people tried, they finally got one lady signed up.
More people have signed up to take a one-way trip to Mars than for Obamacare. And judging by your fate under the law’s death panels, it seems like you might as well go out in style.
The best part:
“Under the new law, everyone is required to have health insurance by 2014 or pay increasing fines.”
How far away is 2014? Oh yes—2 and a half months. (Family holiday tip: Obamacare roulette! Instead of opening gifts, everyone tries logging on at once to hastily meet the deadline. The first person with a monthly premium under $400 wins!)
This would be like Apple coming out with the 5S, refusing to update it when bugs are pointed out, selling just a handful, and saying that if you use any of their older phones they’ll brick before the end of the year.
Can you imagine the outrage? People would storm their stores, set fire to their Cupertino HQ and emerge triumphant with Tim Cook’s head on a pike.*
*excerpt from the chapter titled “When I’m Gone” in the Steve Jobs Private Diaries
Private companies know better than to release a crap product you’re forced to update to because they’re responsible to you—their customers. Government should be even more responsible to you—after all, without you, they’d have no money or job—but they don’t give a damn. They’re the only game in town! There’s no Samsung or Nokia to ensure that loyal patrons stay loyal. Canada doesn’t market themselves with stats showing why their country is better, except as a joke.
But back to the Hindenburg that is Obamacare.
The healthcare website, healthcare.gov, is such a bomb that the people who designed it don’t even want to be associated with it.
It’d be like your parents changing their last name because you turned out to be such a disappointment (imagine how difficult that would make Jewish genealogy!)
But this wasn’t a surprise. In fact, the Obama administration knew it was going to be terrible:
Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.
So the next time someone tells you that Obamacare “isn’t about Obama!” and “isn’t political!” and “is just about giving poor folks healthcare!” remember that it was built by Organizing for America and other Obama political employees for political gain and nothing else.
All this failure doesn’t come cheap. The website was supposed to be $93.7 million.
It cost $292 million and is based on 10-year-old technology.
For that much, the government could have bought every obese American under the poverty line (39.1 million Americans under poverty line, 33% whom are obese) a personal training and dietary education session. Talk about driving down the cost of healthcare and stimulating the economy!
Obama and Democrats simply love to bash Republicans by saying that they shouldn’t complain if they don’t have a plan.
Here’s the thing: they did. In 2004, President Bush proposed health savings accounts, which would provide $1000 in healthcare credits for families, plus tax credits depending upon income. It also included a proposal for small businesses to purchase healthcare across state lines–something which would guarantee a reduction in overall healthcare costs.
His opponents derided it as being hugely expensive and completely tanked the idea which would have helped drastically cut healthcare costs and the number of uninsured, citing figures as high as $41 billion over 10 years.
Fast forward to 2013, where Obamacare is projected to cost $1.36 trillion over 10 years.
Obama: “and I would’ve gotten away with this line of argument, if it weren’t for that pesky Bush!”
Don’t you folks just miss the salad days of Obama’s ‘if you like your healthcare, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep it. If you like that weird cancerous mole on your face, you can keep it because we won’t discriminate against pre-existing conditions’ meme that went around when this shitstorm of a bill was being passed to assuage our understandably-worried minds?
Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.
At least Obamacare is cheaper though, right? They don’t call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for nothing!
The Chicago Tribune, Obama’s hometown paper, reports:
The Tribune‘s Peter Frost found that a typical user in the system — a 33-year-old single father in this case — would see his premiums “more than double” from the current average of $233 a month. But if the single dad wants his premiums to remain in range, he’ll need to sign up for an annual deductible of $12,700. The average deductible before ObamaCare for this consumer would have been $3,500.
Obamacare: making healthy working people pay for sick people, unemployed people, crackheads , Type 2 diabetics, alcoholics, weekend computer duster huffers, your Aunt Hazel’s Vicodin, acupuncture, a cough, complete fatasses, pack-a-day-smokers, witchcraft, and elective plastic surgery since 2013!
I plowed long and hard (but enough about Tara Reid) and found one positive story about Obamacare: Connecticut.
Yes: noble, tiny Connecticut hasn’t completely hit a wall with this disastrous law. In fact:
“In the first two weeks of operation, 10,678 applications were opened, and the state processed 2,372 applications for policyholders.”
Great! Only 320,728 more uninsured Connecticutters to enroll! At this rate, people will be completely signed up by–March 2016. Darn! Just two years too late til you get taxed. Hope you don’t keel over when you don’t get a tax return!
Here’s the thing about a fuckup this bad: you can’t point at a rotten peach and claim that a little bit is still edible. Continuing to eat it will make you sick.
Consequently, you can’t point at Obamacare and claim that, just because the website didn’t colossally shut down in one tiny state, that it’s perfectly usable for 49 others.
This is the problem with trying to do a national program: you ignore the “States” half of United States. States are designed to be laboratories to see what works and what doesn’t. This is why “Romneycare” in Massachusetts is different from Obamacare—it requires people to buy health insurance in one state. The federal government can’t require you to purchase jack shit. A state government can. It’s far more comforting knowing that if one state screws up, you have 49 others which will accept you with open arms. It’s dystopian to have an entire country adopt a policy forcing you to buy something you don’t want or need.
United States mean states banding together to increase strength. It doesn’t mean states putting on ankle weights to synchronize swim.
