Tag Archives: Obamacare

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What will happen if Obamacare gets fixed?

I’ve been giving thought to a situation that admittedly remains highly hypothetical … at the moment.

The situation involves attempts to repair the healthcare.gov website that has given the White House — not to mention millions of Americans — headaches, heartburn and all kinds of angst.

The website was meant to be the vehicle with which Americans would sign up for the Affordable Care Act. It hasn’t worked. The White House, President Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, staffers throughout the federal government and just plain folks are up in arms over it.

The president has apologized for the mess. His critics aren’t accepting his apology. They’re demanding that heads should roll. Sebelius seems like the likely target, given that HHS is administering this snafu and Sebelius is in charge of HHS.

Congressional Republicans have declared the ACA to be a disaster. They know, by golly, that it will never work. It won’t provide health insurance at a price Americans can afford, they say.

The website fix? Forget about it, the critics say. The website is just a tiny fraction of the problem.

Well, this is all so much political grandstanding.

I’m wondering now what will happen if the Obama administration’s team of computer geeks fixes the website. What will occur if healthcare.gov is repaired and the site is able to process applications? What’s going to happen if by some chance the ACA starts enrolling Americans, who then will be insured for the first time in years?

And what will occur if the nation’s health care deliver system actually starts seeing improvements that its supporters — starting with the president himself — have said it would deliver?

I’m not yet ready to start throwing dirt on the ACA. I want to wait to see if the experts can fix what’s wrong with the website and I’m waiting to see what happens when the law gets implemented fully.

If after all that occurs and the system is still a mess … well, then you can hand me the shovel.

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Obama: ‘That’s on us. That’s on me.’

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook yesterday that praised President Ronald Reagan’s taking responsibility for misleading the nation on the Iran-Contra scandal. “That’s how a leader” should do take the heat, the message said.

The implication, of course, is that President Barack Obama hasn’t taken personal responsibility for the mess-up involving the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the ridiculous failure of the website healthcare.gov to handle applications for insurance.

Well, today the president said, “It’s on me,” meaning that he’s the man in charge and that he is responsible for the insurance policy cancellations that have scared the daylights out of Americans.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/obama-gives-people-extra-year-keep-health-insurance-2D11591250

Obama has instituted a plan to give Americans an extra year to shop for insurance while keeping their current insurance plans.

He vowed to take action to stop the cancellations. Today, he announced the plan. Will it work? Well, like everything associated with the ACA, that remains to be seen.

Will the government computer geeks be able to repair what ails the website? That, too, is an open question.

However, I swear I heard the president say today that he’s at fault for this mess. I believe that’s what a leader is supposed to do.

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Obamacare rollout numbers put in perspective

I got to listen to a lot of yammering through most of my workday today about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the enrollment numbers released today by the White House.

The yapping came from Fox News commentators who — not surprisingly — were calling the rollout a disaster and the initial enrollment figures a testament to the incompetence of the Obama administration.

Then I read this article one of my dearest friends on the planet shared on social media. It tells a different story.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115586/obamacare-enrollment-october-was-106k-says-hhs

It says essentially two things: One, while the enrollment numbers aren’t great, they compare favorably with the initial enrollment of those in Massachusetts who became covered under what’s been called “Romneycare,” which is former Gov. Mitt Romney’s version of a mandated health insurance policy enacted in his state. Oh yes, and Romney campaigned unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2012 by running against the Affordable Care Act. The second thing the article notes is that despite the troubles with the healthcare.gov website and all the hoo-hah associated with it, the computer program stands a decent chance of getting fixed.

But that’s not what the conservative media are telling us. They’re insisting that the ACA is a disaster. They say it will never work. They insist that the computer problems are but a symptom of a failed policy.

President Obama made promises he couldn’t keep, to be sure. He said no one would be denied health insurance if they were happy with the policies they have. That’s turned out to be not the case. Is it his fault? Well, he is the president of the United States, the man in charge. It’s on his watch and he should take the heat — which he is doing.

I am unwilling, though, to give up on the Affordable Care Act. I feel the need to remind my friends on the right — and on the far right — that Medicare rolled out in 1965 with some significant glitches in it.

President Lyndon Johnson was in charge then and he managed to work with congressional leaders of both parties to fix the program. Does anyone want to scrap Medicare now? I didn’t think so.

The article attached to this blog analyzes the problem with a decided lack of passion.

I think that’s how we all should examine the ACA and look for ways to improve it.

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POTUS’s apology nothing new or unique

President Obama’s critics are making much hay — too much, if you ask me — of his recent apology to those who’ve had their insurance policies canceled as the Affordable Care Act kicks in.

He said he’s sorry. Big deal.

He’s not the first president to apologize to Americans. He won’t be the last.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_HEALTH_OVERHAUL?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-11-08-03-56-20

* Former President Richard Nixon apologized in 1977, three years after resigning his office in disgrace over the Watergate crisis. He said he was sorry for letting people down. He apologized to Americans across the land for the mistakes he made.

* President Ronald Reagan, while not actually apologizing, acknowledged he “misled” Americans about whether he was selling arms to Nicaraguan rebels, aka the Contras, in exchange for deals to secure the release of Americans held prisoner in Iran.

* President Bill Clinton expressed “deep regret” over his inappropriate relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He didn’t actually apologize during that nationally broadcast mea culpa, but we got the point.

OK, so President Obama’s rollout of the ACA has gone badly. The website wasn’t prepared fully to handle the volume of Americans seeking to enroll. Then came the cancellations of insurance policies, which the president said wouldn’t happen. “You can keep your health insurance” if you’re happy with it, he told us. Remember?

My thought is this: The ACA is going to be tinkered, fine-tuned and improved as we move farther into its implementation. Do I understand all of it? No more than its ardent critics understand it. I’m not yet willing to toss it aside and declare it a disaster, as they have done.

As for the presidential apology, it’s been overblown.

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In defense of National Public Radio

I want to rise in defense of National Public Radio, even though NPR really shouldn’t need little ol’ me to defend it.

I spoke the other day with a friend in the media business and she mentioned what I consider to be something of an urban myth about NPR. It’s that it’s considered to be “too liberal” for folks in the Texas Panhandle, this bastion of rigid, rock-ribbed conservative Republicanism. My friend, I should add, doesn’t share that view, but merely was telling me what she has heard over many years from friends, colleagues, neighbors and everyday strangers.

NPR’s critics are well-known. Another friend, the great editorialist Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has referred to NPR as “National Propaganda Radio.” I’ve conversed over the phone with Republican U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry’s staff members who feel compelled to whisper the term “NPR” when talking to me; they don’t want their colleagues in Mac’s D.C. office to hear them saying nice things about the public radio network.

It’s all hogwash.

I have two points to make about NPR.

First, High Plains Public Radio came into existence in the early 1980s, headquartered in Garden City, Kan. But in the late 1990s, HPPR opened a studio in downtown Amarillo. It came here thanks to the hard work of several prominent Panhandle residents. One of them was Mark Bivins, an Amarillo businessman who hardly could be labeled a flaming liberal.

I have talked with Bivins at length about HPPR and his take on it simply is that it presents news and analysis fairly and without bias. That’s why he is such an ardent supporter of HPPR’s mission in this region.

My second point is a bit more specific. It concerns the Affordable Care Act and the media’s coverage of it. Another friend, Mark Haslett, is a former newspaper colleague who, in his previous life, was employed by HPPR at its Amarillo studio. He’s a longtime broadcast and print journalist who understands the concept of fairness and bias in reporting the news. Incidentally, Mark has returned to public broadcasting.

Haslett told me some years back that NPR had handed down an edict to its member stations that the effort to change the nation’s health care system shouldn’t be called a “reform.” Haslett said NPR’s mandate was to refer to it as an “overhaul.” The term “reform,” Mark said, connotes an improvement; “overhaul” is a neutral term that doesn’t tilt the discussion in either direction.

Therein lies an example of the fairness and objectivity that NPR seeks to build into its news reporting.

Is it deemed too “liberal” by some folks here? Sure. I accept that. I also must insist that those critics are viewing that particular medium through their own bias. If a news organization doesn’t present news and analysis to fit their own world view, then it’s biased.

I’ll stick with National Public Radio any day.

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Wrong to scrap ‘Obamacare’?

A great Native American philosopher — Tonto — once told Kemo Sabe that “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The Lone Ranger’s sidekick was right. It also serves as a reminder of what’s happening today as congressional Republicans keep yammering for the end of the Affordable Care Act, citing the disastrous rollout as evidence of the law’s failure.

Dial back to 2006, therefore, and let’s remind ourselves what many of those Republicans were saying about another big-government unveiling, an amendment to Medicare benefits, that didn’t go so well. It came under the guidance of a Republican administration led by President George W. Bush.

Congressional Democrats were gleefully calling that rollout a disaster and were criticizing the Part D amendment to Medicare purely partisan grounds. That was the first wrong.

Republicans sought to remind their Democratic “friends” that they all needed patience and needed to tweak the changes. Let’s not toss it all out, they urged.

They tinkered with Medicare and today it’s working pretty well for the elderly Americans who rely on it.

The ACA has had trouble getting off the ground. Who’s doing the yammering now? Republicans — on what appears to be purely partisan grounds. There, folks, is the second wrong.

Democrats are now urging the same level of patience that the GOP sought seven years ago when President Bush sought to make changes to Medicare.

Republicans are having none of it. They want the ACA tossed aside. It’s no good. It doesn’t work.

Interesting, though, that they’ve made a judgment on a law that hasn’t been implemented fully.

Tonto’s advice to the Lone Ranger is as sound now as it was when he said it in the old days.

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‘Monkey court’ label heats up hearing

U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., has just made a name for himself by attaching an unflattering name to a congressional hearing in which he was a participant.

He called a committee meeting a “monkey court” while chastising his Republican colleagues critical of the Affordable Care Act.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2013/10/24/sot-dc-obamacare-pallone-monkey-court.cnn.html

He didn’t need to use that kind of language to describe what’s supposed to be a serious hearing on a very serious matter, which is the implementation of the ACA that is meant to provide millions of Americans with health insurance they can afford.

I fear it’s just the beginning of what figures to be a highly contentious time leading up to — and perhaps beyond — the 2014 midterm elections.

Pallone believes his Republican colleagues are trying to “scare” Americans into opting out of trying to log into the troubled healthcare.gov website because their intent is to destroy the ACA. I’m not going to ascribe motives to politicians I don’t know. However, there does seem to a pattern developing, with Republicans not wanting to give the ACA any grace period before jumping down the throats of those who support it.

I happen to agree with critics who want someone to be held accountable for the hideous rollout snafus that have developed with healthcare.gov. That someone well might have to be Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, on whose watch this mess developed.

Let us not take that huge leap just yet. As Van Jones noted on a recent CNN Crossfire segment, Medicare had its serious problems when it became law in 1965. Congress and the White House tinkered with it for years before working out the bugs.

Is anyone now willing to get rid of Medicare? Hardly.

The Affordable Care Act needs some time. So, let’s dispense with the monkey courts.

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Time for a new HHS secretary

Kathleen Sebelius has served the nation mostly with distinction during her time as Health and Human Services secretary.

Until now.

The rollout of the Affordable Care Act on Oct. 1 as been beset with mountains of trouble, relating mostly to the glitches in the website set up to manage the implementation of the act.

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/19/21040394-sebelius-will-be-a-no-show-at-obamacare-hearing?lite

The mess-up has been huge. Is it Sebelius’s fault that her team of computer technicians haven’t been able to handle the huge traffic flow onto the site? No. However, the foul-ups have occurred on her watch. They involve the unveiling of President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. It has gone badly … to say the very least.

Now the HHS boss says she won’t take part in congressional hearings set for next month, citing scheduling conflicts.

I believe it’s time for her resign and hand the job over to someone else.

The criticism of the ACA rollout, of course, comes from congressional Republicans. What does anyone really expect? They’ve been critical of the law since its inception, its approval by Congress, its affirmation by the Supreme Court and its place at the center of the debate over whether to fund the government and increase the federal debt ceiling.

The very least one could have hoped would be for the unveiling of the law, which took effect while Congress was tying itself in knots over the budget, to occur smoothly. Yes, many millions of Americans have sought to enroll in some insurance plan. But didn’t HHS officials realize that going in? Didn’t Secretary Sebelius foresee the need to ensure that the system would work effectively?

The system has crashed repeatedly. The Obama administration admits it’s been a rocky start since the Oct. 1 rollout. Well, do you think?

Kathleen Sebelius has been on the job since the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency. And as her GOP critics have noted, she had time for an appearance on Jon Stewart’s comedy show, but doesn’t have the time to answer questions from Congress.

It’s time for Sebelius to go.

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GOP fails to heed the message

Two new polls should turn congressional Republicans downright apoplectic.

The Associated Press/GFK poll puts congressional approval at 5 percent. That’s bad enough. Now comes a new Gallup Poll that says 28 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP, a record low for the Gallup organization.

http://news.msn.com/us/poll-republicans-get-the-blame-in-shutdown

To be sure, Democrats aren’t faring much better. Public opinion surveys are blaming Congress — not the White House or the president — for the government mess that now threatens to blow the economy to smithereens.

And by Congress, I mean members of both parties.

However, since Republicans control the budget-writing arm of the legislative branch — the House of Representatives — they are going to get bulk of the blame if the parties fail to agree on a way to reopen parts of the government and increase the nation’s debt ceiling.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-on-the-potomac/2013/10/republican-approval-rating-falls-to-lowest-point-in-gallup-poll-history/

Some of us keep harping on the obvious: The GOP strategy, which has been all but abandoned, of trying to link defunding of the Affordable Care Act to approving a new budget is a sure loser. Smart Republicans keep harping on that to the wild-eyed crazies comprising the tea party wing of their party.

Now they’re messing with the debt limit, even suggesting that defaulting on our nation’s financial obligations isn’t that big of a deal.

I do believe it is a very big deal.

Failure to resolve this matter is going to wipe out what’s left of the GOP’s paltry support.

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GOP ‘playing with fire’ over debt limit

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is the latest Washington, D.C. official to turn himself into a Sunday news show hologram, making five appearances today on broadcast and cable TV to deliver a stern message.

Failure to increase the nation’s debt limit would be catastrophic to the economy, Lew said.

Is anyone listening on the Republican side of the aisle?

http://thehill.com/video/sunday-shows/326799-lew-congress-is-playing-with-fire

The debt limit stands at $16.7 trillion. If Congress doesn’t approve a measure to boost it by Oct. 17, the nation’s ability to pay its debts runs out. The United States would default on its obligations.

The Republican-led House of Representatives, though, is digging in on that one. The GOP wants to defund the Affordable Care Act so badly it has produced a partial government shutdown. GOP showboats like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas say they’ll do “whatever it takes to defund Obamacare.”

Does that mean destroying people’s retirement accounts, downgrading the nation’s worldwide credit rating, forcing a stock market collapse? Is that what they mean by “whatever it takes”?

Lew’s message is stark. I happen to believe his prognosis. Does anyone in power in D.C. care about those of us out here who are going to pay the price for their foolishness?