Two days, two revealing stories showing that Democrats are still relying on the stupidity of the American voter, as revealed by Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber years ago, explaining how the Act got passed.
A decade later, we've had sufficient time to go through and experience much of the Affordable Care Act. It would take a pretty big leap for an individual to overcome the fact that only a small number of Americans got anything "affordable" out of the deal.
"Affordable" was word play, because it was not about affordability for citizens, but about affordability for government and insurance company partnerships, how they could save money, all wrapped up in a thin film of some low-hanging free checkups and not dropping people with pre-existing conditions to distract from what Obamacare is, a taxation and registration plan.
The Affordable Care Act is a cautionary tale, because it worked, we were persuaded that we'd save $2,500 per family, that we'd be able to keep our doctors, that we'd have the same options available as those available to Obama's family, that there would be no more uninsured, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Relentlessly, Democrats are resurrecting the strategy of misleading the public and promising stuff that's already failed and name-calling, mischaracterizing and attempting to shame and silence anyone who thinks differently.
Here's the first story from today. Headlines include the tale of a woman being deported who has illegally been in the US for 15 years. You can read through one sympathetic portrayal of the case in a BuzzFeed " article by Adolfo Flores, "An Asylum-Seeking Mom Who Applied For A Special Visa For Victims Of Violence Is About To Be Deported Anyway."
The headline is an example of Democratic wordcraft and might evoke a liberal "Tsk-tsk,"disapproving sound for ICE (and of course President Trump), unless you read the article, which bent over backwards and failed to make the story one of an "outrageous" deportation.
This misleading attempt to conjure up outrage fails in its first line as we learn the woman was trying to escape "domestic abuse," not a typically permissible ground for skipping ahead of the immigration process and seeking asylum in the US. (Asylum, because she was already here illegally. Refugee status would be sought if she dealt with the US government BEFORE entering illegally.)
OK, so the grounds are not legitimate grounds for being granted the right to avoid legal immigration and enter the US, that is domestic violence, any more than a US citizen victim of domestic violence could gain immediate entry into another country without legally doing so.
Then the BuzzFeed article goes into details about mean old ICE, and naturally how much meaner it is under President Trump. But read further and find that in 2004, the woman was issued a notice to appear in immigration court, which allegedly contained no date or time for such appearance and therefore, the woman let it go. When she didn't show up for her hearing, the court ordered deportation.
Released into the population, as so many others, the woman likely banked on never being located because after all, the honor system of showing up in immigration court is an ongoing example of epic fail when it comes to immigration.
Instead we find that the woman worked in a restaurant and helped take care of people with disabilities and the elderly, which instead of achieving the article's pretty obvious intent of making her the equivalent of an honor student, actually indicates that these businesses she worked for chose to opt-out of e-verify even when it came to working with vulnerable populations like those with disabilities and the elderly.
We also find that the woman claimed she received no notices from immigration court…How would they locate her or any of the other honor-system failures who don't show up in immigration court? And thus, though still not deported, the outrage about this woman's story wanes to a ripple if you read through the spin.
This story caught my attention because yesterday, we were hammered with news of Joe Biden's campaign ad about health care. The ad portrayed some of the catastrophe in Biden's life, including an accident that killed family members and his son's cancer in an attempt to show why health care is "personal for Biden," but actually draws a stark contrast between Biden's experience as a long-time VIP public employee and what happens to the rest of us.
We already KNOW what Biden's telling us, that if you're a public employee, especially a whatever level VIP, you will carry the benefits of status into your health care. Public employees, who carefully carved out their own different and superior treatment from that available to the rest of us under Obamacare is by now old news. These differences are mirrored in their superior access to job security, paid for benefits, lifetime coverages, etc.
Bouncing off the shared human experience of unanticipated illness or accident, Biden tries to bring everyone else into the false world of wonderful health services available to "the rest of us." The ad's disconnected and unreal premise is merely a manipulation at best and a thumbing of his nose at the rest of us whose opportunity for such VIP public employee treatment was worsened by Obamacare.
Joe Biden's ad highlights the deficits of Obamacare rather than proving that addressing the misery imposed on consumers by the health industrial complex in this country was improved by Obamacare.
Take the accident situation. Under Obamacare, you could go to any emergency room to get stabilized without having to worry about balance billing, that sinister practice whereby consumers, sometimes unable to choose from a 'participating' provider are provided services by whatever-the-market-will-bear providers who then, if you're lucky enough to recover, start billing you.
But Obamacare could give a rat's butt whether you obtain needed medical services after such stabilization because balance billing by non-participating providers in the course of needed medical services is NOT addressed or prohibited or limited by Obamacare. Your options are simple, beg, borrow or declare bankruptcy.
This is only the beginning of the jeopardy to health that was enacted into law by Obamacare in its partnership with insurance companies. All out of pocket expenses for consumers have gone up dramatically under Obamacare, the costs of obtaining health insurance, premiums, and the costs of using it, deductibles, copays and coinsurance. Further, coverages have been excluded from inclusion, including a large number of medications, meaning that consumers face bankruptcy in the face of illness.
This is because in its deal with insurance companies, the Affordable Care Act established bare minimum standards for health insurance that also justified insurers in charging more for their plans without informing that the tradeoff was higher prices, less coverage with an emphasis on the finite costs of checkups (noninsurance costs that should cover UNANTICIPATED medical needs and services).
This means that unlike Joe Biden, the devastation from a family accident would likely leave each of us facing financial as well as emotional ruin.
Then there's the medications you require or are administered during your hospital stay, or expensive chemotherapy drugs you might require. Formulary lists that exclude hundreds if not more of available medications means that you will NOT get reimbursed anything for those meds. In Joe Biden's ad, we're not told what meds were necessarily provided to his family members, but what we do know is that under Obamacare the exclusion of medications from formulary lists as well as the prices of meds went up, in some cases 40 times the rate of inflation.
Then there's the premium increases, which Obamacare fans were fond of saying would've been larger without Obamacare, despite the record-setting increases we saw in certain plans that covered less than ever before as they embraced the new minimal standards of Obamacare. Joe Biden, as a Congressperson doesn't worry about that, because taxpayers pay two-thirds of that cost.
And don't forget, public employee Obamacare plans are Obamacare in name only, as I've covered before, they're plans with superior coverage designed only for public employees whose premiums are paid at taxpayer expense in spite of the fact that their salaries would in no way entitle "the rest of us" to premium assistance.
