March 29, 2024

Obama finally signs up for ObamaCare, sort of

Let’s see… how could we possibly make President Obama’s entirely symbolic enrollment in his health-care scheme the biggest public-relations fiasco possible?

Obama finally signs up for ObamaCare, sort of

Well, first and foremost, we would delay his enrollment until months after ObamaCare’s disastrous launch, after American citizens had already wasted thousands of hours battling a website prone to crashes, freezes, coding errors, incorrect price quotes, and data loss.  We would delay it so long that even friendly media started badgering White House spokespeople about why the President refused to sign up for the program he imposed upon the rest of us.

We’d put off that enrollment until the very day of the deadline… and then secretly delay the enrollment deadline for one more day!  I’m old enough to remember when the Affordable Care Act was sold to us as a triumph of central planning and superior government management, a plan carefully designed by the Best and Brightest to impose order on the unruly chaos of the private sector.  But it’s not a plan, it’s not truly a “law,” and it most certainly is not “the settled law of the land,” as its increasingly shrill defenders claim.  ObamaCare doesn’t have deadlines.  They move.  It has Walking Dead lines.

So having put things off until the last possible moment, I’d have Americans rolling in the aisles by claiming this much-delayed enrollment constituted Obama “leading by example,” as White House adviser Valerie Jarrett did today.  Waiting until the people suffer through months of chaos and then enrolling is “leading by example?”  Oh, that Valerie, she’s a stitch.  I hope laughing until you cough up a lung is covered by ObamaCare.

It’s a sterling example of what the Obama era has immortalized as “leading from behind,” and puts me in mind of a little Gilbert and Sullivan:

In enterprise of martial kind,
When there was any fighting,
He led his regiment from behind
(He found it less exciting).
But when away his regiment ran,
His place was at the fore, O-
That celebrated,
Cultivated,
Underrated
Noble man,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

But wait, we’re not finished yet.  Crazy political spin from advisers isn’t enough to generate a Category 5 hurricane of flimflam.  No, for that we’d have to send a team of Obama staffers to sign up for him, even as reporters were wondering if his very special personal encounter with the allegedly “fixed” Healthcare.gov website would be televised live.  Which would have been awesome, because the website crashed again today.

Yes, my fellow Americans, ObamaCare really is easy to sign up for… provided you have a vast imperial retinue to do it for you.  Is that even legal?  Well, never mind, because it happened, as reported by Politico:

In what an official acknowledged is a “symbolic” move since the president gets his medical care from the military, Obama selected a low-cost bronze plan through the District of Columbia exchange. He made the pick over the weekend while vacationing in Hawaii.

Obama “was pleased to participate in a plan as a show of support for these marketplaces which are providing quality, affordable health care options to more than a million people,” the official added.

But Obama did not directly sign up for insurance. Rather, his staff went in person to sign him up, an official told POLITICO.

“Like some Americans, the complicated nature of the president’s case required an in-person sign-up,” the official said. “As you’d expect, the president’s personal information is not readily available in the variety of government databases HealthCare.gov uses to verify identities.”

Obama signed up for coverage only for himself and not for the rest of the first family, and will pay a premium that’s under $400 per month, the official said.

Oh, so the “complicated nature” of his case made it necessary for His Majesty to dispatch his retainers to handle it for him?  What other Americans have such circumstances?  Obama claimed, about a million times, that buying insurance from Healthcare.gov would be as easy as purchasing a plane ticket on Kayak.  Does that normally require a squad of staffers to handle?  Looks like somebody doesn’t believe all those Administration claims about a radically improved ObamaCare shopping experience.  The only thing that could make this more perfect would be if the Obama staffers used taxpayers as footstools while they were signing him up.

Remember when the President claimed his insurance plans would provide great coverage for less than the cost of your cell phone bill?  He picked out a crummy bottom-of-the-barrel plan with a huge deductible that doesn’t even cover his family.

News cameras captured a live shot of the Obama staffers arriving at exchange headquarters to personally enroll the absent President in ObamaCare:

minion_horde_small

The epilogue of this farce will come when Obama doesn’t bother to pay his premium (cheaper than your cell phone bill, kids!) and his policy, which of course he would never use anyway, gets dropped.  Or else we’ll discover that even his absentee enrollment was a sham, with invalid half-complete paperwork.

Perhaps the White House will commemorate the one-year anniversary of his enrollment by releasing a picture of Obama staring thoughtfully at a photo of the staffers who signed him up.

I rather doubt his long-delayed symbolic enrollment will do anything to improve ObamaCare’s polling numbers, which just hit a record low of 35 percent support in a CNN poll, a five-point drop since the alleged rebirth of HealthCare.gov over the Thanksgiving weekend.  And support is cratering among women, who have previously been much more likely to stick with this non-law and give it one more chance.

When, to evade Destruction’s hand,
To hide they all proceeded,
No soldier in that gallant band
Hid half as well as he did.
He lay concealed throughout the war,
And so preserved his gore, O!
That unaffected,
Undetected,
Well connected
Warrior,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

 

 

Share
Source: