March 28, 2024

ObamaCare’s Website is a Disaster

In an effort to contain the growing scandal of the catastrophic and spectacular failure of the federal website Healthcare.gov used by Americans for the online enrollment into ObamaCare insurance exchanges, President Barack Obama held a conference at the White House on October 21, 2013. As if he were in a campaign rally, Obama had 13 people lined up on the stage behind him in the White House’s Rose Garden and more than 100 supporters were seated in the audience.

The president was introduced by a woman who after a number of frustrating attempts was able to apply and select an insurance plan. However, the mainstream media did not report that the 13 “human props” standing behind the president were unable to “actually purchase an ObamaCare insurance plan. Only three of them were even to complete the application process,” according to an article written by John Hayward in the Internet publication Red State on October 21, 2013. Hayward’s article was entitled “The High Cost of ObamaCare Deception.” He stated the following: “All this ridiculous crap is happening because Obama and his allies can’t bring themselves to be honest about anything. One of ObamaCare’s central flaws is its pervasive dishonesty… We all know about Obama’s towering “do you like your plan, then you can keep it” lie. He lied shamelessly about insurance premiums going down, too.”

Obama acknowledged the online enrollment problems and stated that “It’s fair to say that nobody is more frustrated by that than I am… There is no excuse for the problems, and these problems are getting fixed.” However, the president did not hold any government officials accountable, nor did he say when the immense problems of the government websites will be fixed. Obama praised highly his healthcare law. He then gave a telephone number to call to enroll Americans by phone. Several conservative journalists called that number but were unable to get through.

Sean Hannity did manage to talk to woman telephone operator who lived in Panama City, Florida. She informed him that the system was down for the next two days. Apparently, no one informed Obama that the system was down, and once again, he gave incorrect information to the nation. The woman was promptly fired by the Obama administration for talking to Hannity. This was most cruel as the lady was very polite and proper.

The catastrophic failure of the government website will probably take a few months to get fixed. The Obama administration ever optimistic said that by the end of November the website would be operational. The president announced that he was bringing top national experts to fix the website, which cost the taxpayers several millions of dollars. Even television comics raised the question as to why did the president not bring the best and the brightest to set up the website in the first place. You are expected to bring the best experts to create the most expensive website and not wait for it to fail and  then bring the Silicon Valley experts.

The implementation ObamaCare will wreck the nation. It will bring massive unemployment, enormous deficits, and destroy the best healthcare system the world has ever seen. The president and the Democratic Party, who voted in Congress for this health law without a single Republican vote in Congress, need to be held accountable by voters in future elections in this nation. If the Department of Health and Human Services was not able to set a proper website, how can Americans expect that it will make the healthcare of the entire nation run successfully.

The astonishing failure of the debut of ObamaCare is the perfect demonstration of why the federal government should not be trusted with the healthcare of the nation. Conservatives understand that bureaucrats are never held accountable for their incompetence. Almost all federal programs are badly managed and poor service is very common as well as cost overruns. Barack Obama has been protected by the compliant liberal mainstream media regardless of his many failures and scandals as president. He will go down in American history as the most unaccountable, incompetent, and the one who has been given more free passes by the liberal media than any other president.

The Obama administration has been criticized for its lack of transparency in explaining its efforts to get the exchanges to work in the 36 states which refuse to establish their own exchanges. Error-ridden enrollment data has been passed along to insurance companies from the few Americans who have been able to enroll.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote an article entitled “Sebelius Thrust into Firestorm on Exchanges” in The New York Times on October 23, 2013. She explained that the first person to call for the resignation of Kathleen Sibelius, who is Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, was Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, an old family friend. Secretary Sibelius has received an enormous amount of criticism over the failure of the website of the government and the inability to enroll millions of Americans online in insurance exchanges of 36 states which do not create their own website.

The reporter explained how badly Secretary Sibelius did in her recent television interview with the progressive Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio commentator, said that she looked “ignorant, misleading, and totally incompetent.” Obviously, if Secretary Sibelius were the CEO of a corporation, the board of directors would have fired her by now. However, Barack Obama does not fire incompetent government officials if they are loyal to his regime. No one was fired or demoted over the Benghazi affair that left four Americans dead. No one was fire from the Justice Department over the scandal of Fast and Furious or for the spying over 100 journalists of the Associated Press. Only Lois Lerner resigned, after many months of collecting her salary while being on leave, over the IRS scandal regarding the persecution of conservative and religious organizations, even though many high-ranking officials of the IRS were involved and most probably officials of the White House.

The president, who protects loyal officials who are incompetent, likes to fire high-ranking military officers who do not agree with or criticize his policies. Nine high ranking generals and admirals have been fired by Obama in 2013. Retired generals who had been interviewed by Glenn Beck at TheBlaze have said the president is not only eliminating high-ranking commanders who do not agree with him, but is striking fear on those are still serving in the Armed Forces.

Obama has also declared an unconstitutional war against religion and Christianity in the military. Never before in history, a president has attacked religion in the military. Our brave men and women in uniform risk their lives and many die defending our Constitution, including the First Amendment that protects freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Sarah Carter wrote an article entitled “Obama Purging Military Commanders” which was published on Bear Witness Central. org on October 23, 2013. She reported that the Retired Army Major General Paul Vallely stated the following: “Obama will not purge a civilian or political appointee because they had bought into Obama’s ideology. The White House protects their own. That’s why they stalled on the investigation into Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and ObamaCare. He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military, and reducing us as a superpower. Anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.” Carpenter wrote that a Pentagon official, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that officers have been told not to talk about Obama or the politics of the White House, if they wanted to keep their jobs. It is appalling and unacceptable that the Obama administration is also denying freedom of speech to the members of the military.

The nine patriotic high-ranking commanders that were fired or forced to retire were the following: four-star general Carter Ham, Major General Ralph Baker, Brigadier General Bryan Roberts, Major General Gregg A. Sturdevant, Major General Charles M.M.Gurganus, Lieutenant General David Holmes Huntoon Jr, Major General Michael Carey, Vice Admiral Tim Giardina and Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette. Additionally, retired four-star general and CIA director David Petraeus was also forced to submit his resignation.

Secretary Sibelius testified in Capitol Hill during the spring of 2013 that the exchanges were “on track” to open on October 1, 2013. Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Health Subcommittee, stated on October 21 the following: “We’ve got lots of questions. Why would she mislead us so shortly before the rollout, when they were obviously not prepared and are still not prepared, and it’s going to take a long time to fix the problem? We want to know how long she thinks it is going to take.”

The respected magazine Consumer Reports told its readers that the federal insurance exchange was plagued by software glitches and they should have delayed it “for at least another month, if you can.” Consumer Reports stated that only 271,000 of the 9.47 million people who attempted to register during the first week could do so. The magazine said “that’s about 1 in 35.”

According to the health law, consumers have until March 31, 2014 to sign up for coverage. Under the rules, individuals who buy medical insurance after February 15, 2014 could the subjected to fines on the individual mandate, which requires must people to have medical insurance or pay a tax/penalty. However, on October 23 the Obama administration announced that it will give Americans who buy health insurance through new online market-places an extra six weeks to obtain coverage before they risk a penalty. More than likely the deadline will have to be extended since it will take a long time to fix the terrible government website. But how can Americans be able to enroll with an inoperable and hopelessly defective government website?

Four of the contractors who created the website  testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on October 24, 2013. They told Congress that the healthcare website which had a disastrous debut was the result of late changes and a lack of proper testing. Cheryl Campbell representing CGI federal, one of the main contractors, told Congress that she believed the window shopping for insurance feature prior to enrollment was ordered to be disabled in August, 2013 by Henry Chao, deputy director of the Office of Information Services in the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The Obama administration did not want Americans to see the enormous increases in the price of medical insurance by browsing and comparing the health plans on the marketplace portal of the healthcare.gov website prior to creating personal accounts. The Obama administration was fearful that people would not enroll due to the high prices of medical insurance. The president had promised that ObamaCare was going to bring down the cost of medical insurance in the amount of $2,500. Like other things in his health law, this was a lie. This late change in the website in order to deceive Americans was what doomed the website.

Some of the contractor started to blame each other as well as the government. However, when these contractors testified at a September 10, 2013 hearing they said that their parts of the project were moving along well, and that the website will be ready on October 1, 2013.

The testimony of a contractors and the performance of the Department of Health and Human Services did not please the Democrats and Republicans in the committee. Representative Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, said the administration’s complaints about “unexpected demand” were bogus and that other websites routinely handled similar, if not greater, volumes. Congresswoman Eshoo is stated the following: “that really speaks in my craw. I think that’s really kind of a lame excuse. Amazon and eBay don’t crash the week before Christmas and ProFlowers doesn’t crash on Valentine’s day.”

The majority of Americans despise and reject ObamaCare

A Washington Post-ABC poll taken on October 21, 2013 indicated that 56% of Americans say the website problems are part of a greater problem with ObamaCare’s implementation, while 40% believed it was an isolated incident. All the polls that have been taking regarding ObamaCare since the very beginning has shown that most Americans oppose the signature piece of legislation done by the president and the Democratic Party in Congress.

The majority of the American people are aware that ObamaCare is unworkable and that would bring serious damage to our economy and to our health system. No matter how much the president, officials from the White House, and Democratic leaders in Congress have demonized and insulted conservative Republicans in Congress calling them “arsonists,” “terrorists,” “kidnappers,” “members of the Ku Klux Klan,” as well as members of the Tea Party and patriot groups that supported the defunding of ObamaCare, Americans would eventually understand that stopping the funding ObamaCare was the right thing to do for our nation. Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Mike Lee will become heroes for their heroic struggle to stop this train wreck health law.

Republican and Democrat Criticism

After Obama spoke at the White House, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said the following: “The taxpayers had already shelled out hundreds of billions of dollars to build the original website. How much more money is President Obama is going to demand?” The Speaker of House of Representatives, John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, stated the following: “If the President is frustrated about the mounting failures of his healthcare law, it wasn’t apparent today. Americans are looking for accountability, but what the President offered today was little more than self congratulations.”

After more than three weeks of continuous problems with the healthcare website, some Democrats have begun to criticize the government. Some Democrats want to see someone fired over the fiasco of the ObamaCare debut. Representative Xavier Becerra, a absolutely believe that somebody should be held accountable.” Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, said that the website problems were inexcusable and that “somebody ought to get fired.”

 Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, wrote a letter to the president asking him to extend the open enrollment period beyond March 31, 2014. She also expressed on her letter that the website problems were “incredibly frustrating and disappointing.” Representative Steve Scalise, Democrat of Louisiana and a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said the following: “As the former computer programmer, I have a lot of serious questions about how the program could be such a dismal failure. This is a national embarrassment.”

The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) and the radicals and Marxists behind it

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed by President Obama on March 23, 2010. The name of the law is incorrect. The 15 bureaucrats that will run the death panels in the Department of Health and Human Services will decide which procedures will be covered by Medicare for the elderly. They will look at the age of an individual and then decide whether the government, for example, will pay for an expensive treatment, such as chemotherapy or dialysis, for an elderly person. If they deem it that that person is too old, they could decide to deny expensive treatment and let the individual go home and die.

It is quite obvious that insurance premiums are increasing drastically, on the average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, will be 99% more expensive for men and 62% more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered on the old system. So obviously, this is not an “affordable” health law. The sad reality is that the law neither protects individuals nor is affordable. Both promises were horrendous lies made by Obama.

ObamaCare was approved in the Senate with 60 votes in favor and 39 against on December 24, 2009. All Republican Senators voted against the law. In the House of Representatives the vote was 219 in favor and 212 against. The vote in the House took place on March 21, 2010, and there were 178 Republican representatives and 74 Democratic representatives who voted against the law. These votes in Congress were passed at the time when all polls indicated that the vast majority of American people were opposed to the healthcare law.

To partially finance the healthcare law new taxes were imposed on individuals who earn more than $200,000 a year or couples who earn more than $250,000 a year. A 10% tax was levied on indoor tanning, 2.9% on medical equipment, additional taxes on pharmaceutical companies, and 40% on insurance plans titled “cadillac.” The health law has 2,700 pages. Incredibly and unprecedented, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi asked members of Congress to vote on the bill with so many pages and to read it after it was approved. This is how the legislature works in Venezuela and Cuba, where the members rubberstamp the decisions made by the rulers of those countries. Since the law was approved by Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services has added 10,500 pages of regulations, including one unconstitutional regulation requiring religious institutions and churches to provide in their medical insurance plans for their employees that cover for abortions, sterilizations, and contraceptives.

Since the beginning, opponents of the health law from realized that nations, such as Canada and Great Britain, had to ration medical care due to its immense costs. They also understood that this law was a step before the government would establish a single-payer system where all private insurance companies will be eliminated and the government will become the sole provider of the health system of the nation. Of course, socialize medicine would mean less liberty and increased controlled of the federal government over our lives. This is a major objectives that all Marxists in the nation are pushing to accomplish.

Karin McQuillan published an article entitled “I Ache for a President who Loves America” which was published on Bear Witness Central.org on October 22, 2013. The reporter explained that Republicans offered a better health law that it wasn’t even considered by the Democrats in Congress. One idea offered by Republicans to help people with pre-existing conditions was to create a subsidized insurance pool for the uninsurable that would not have tampered with the entire healthcare system.

They also proposed free low-cost clinics that could serve uninsured people who needed basic services, at a cost of a few billion, not trillions of dollars. Republicans offered the idea of tort reform in order to protect doctors from trial lawyers, and thus bringing  down the rates of medical insurance for everyone. They wanted to allow competition along state lines to also bring down the prices of insurance. Lastly, the Republicans wanted the government to remove mandates that would permit insurers to offer low-cost catastrophic insurance, which is all the young and healthy people actually need. All of these Republican health insurance plans were far simpler and will have resulted in low-cost insurance. However, the Republicans’ ideas and proposals were rejected by the president and his allies in Congress. For the very first time in the history of our nation a major legislation impacting every American was not fashioned in a bipartisan manner.

Tens of thousands of people descended upon the nation’s capital to complain about the healthcare law, including members of patriotic and Tea Party organizations. A poll taken by Rasmussen at that time revealed that 59% of Americans were opposed to this legislation and that 70% thought it would drastically increase the deficit of the federal government. Of course, the Marxist who lives in the White House paid no attention to the grievances of patriotic Americans. As soon as the law was signed by the president many states filed lawsuits against the law. Eventually, the Supreme Court by a 5 to 4 decision approved the constitutionality of the health law. The opposition to the healthcare law and other socialistic measures by the Obama administration led the Republican Party to takeover the House of Representatives in the midterm election of 2010.

The White House became fearful of losing the 2012 presidential election. The persecution of patriot, tea party, conservative and religious organizations as well as of large donors to the Republican Party started by using the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department, the Justice Department and other agencies.

 A new book written by Peter Schweizer entitled Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes and Line Their Own Pockets (2013) documented how the Justice Department targeted and filed criminal charges against many individuals and corporations that donated money to the Republican Party. It also stated that the Justice Department chose not to pursue corrupt key political donors of the president. Corrupt individuals who pay Obama’s protection money were immune from prosecution. The author wrote that this abuse of power by the Justice Department was the worst in our history.

This is one of the reasons why that this writer calls this department, the Department of Injustice. This was the way that Al Capone and other Mafia individuals operated in Chicago for many years and collected protection money from businesses. This was how Hugo Chávez persecuted his opponents in Venezuela and rewarded his friends. Additionally, the Venezuelan dictator, like President Obama, fired many high-ranking officers in the Armed Forces who did not agree with his march towards socialism and replace them with others who followed the communist ideology.

Communist Robert Creamer, the husband of socialist Representative Jan Schakowsky from Chicago, was the person who created the “blueprint” for the Obama administration to pass the health law. Creamer was sentenced to federal prison for five months after being found guilty of bank fraud and tax evasion. During his time in prison, Creamer wrote a book called Listen to your Mother: Stand up Straight! How Progressives Can Win (2006). Creamer later wrote in the Huffington Post an article entitled “Breaking the Doors of the Status Quo.”

He explained that fundamental change was possible once the healthcare law was passed. Cramer’s book was supported by the Marxist president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Andy Stern, and by David Axelrod who later worked as a top advisor Obama in the White House. Other Marxists or radicals who pushed for the healthcare law were George Soros, Maude Hurd of ACORN, Roger Hickey of Campaign for America’s Future, Anna Burger of the SEIU, Gerald McEntee of AFSCME, and Jeff Blum of USAction.

Obama’s mentor, medical doctor, and neighbor, Dr. Quentin D. Young, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, wanted the president to establish a single-payer  system, which would completely socialize all medical services and the government would become the sole provider. Many socialists and Marxists across the nation mobilized support for the single-payer system, which is the ultimate objective of the Obama administration. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senator Harry Reid, as well as other Democratic leaders, have already stated that this is what they really want. All of these radicals, socialists, and Marxists as well as members of the Communist Party USA hate what has made the United States the greatest country in the world: limited government, individual liberty, and free enterprise. President Obama is part of this group that helped him win the White House.

Let there be no mistake, Barack Obama, is on the road to establish a socialist totalitarian regime in our beloved nation.

 

 

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