Dictator Obama Strikes Again

Any time the many harms of ObamaCare become apparent to some constituency that might cause a real political problem for Obama, he simply changes the law for a time he hopes will be long enough for the People he thinks stupid to forget the harm.  At first, this was exemptions from the law aimed at labor unions and businesses whose owners supported Democrat candidates for offices.  Then he delayed the larger business mandate that forced them to offer health insurance meeting Obama's gold-plated requirements at great expense.  Then he ruled once again in favor of unions by protecting their health insurance plans, and only theirs, from taxes on the so-called Cadillac plans.  Now, he has declared that individuals can keep their insurance plans that they like for a year, if their insurance company will allow them to do so.

The government does not have the constitutional power to regulate and control our health insurance and our medical care.  But, the strict limits on government power in the Constitution have long been ignored.  However, the only branch of government that has any law-making power at all is Congress, the legislative branch.  It is certainly not the executive branch.  The President of our Republic is supposed to be the Commander-in-Chief and the executor of the laws, not the lawmaker.  The Constitution made this division of function because they knew that a President with the powers of a medieval king was a very dangerous man.  They absolutely would not trust such powers to their President.

But Obama does not believe in the Constitution.  He only believes in socialism and the Constitution is a barrier to socialism.  His ObamaCare law is a great step toward a more complete socialism in America and it will accomplish a huge redistribution of wealth if it survives the many problems of its initial phases.  Obama, the great socialist Leader, desperately wants ObamaCare to endure.  To do so, he has to keep it out of the hands of a Congress no longer completely controlled by committed socialists as it was when the fraudulently name Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was shoved as a fiery coal down our throats.  He is happy to violate the Constitution to protect the PPACA and because he wants badly to establish precedent for the Imperial Presidency.  He wants to be that Great Socialist Dictator the progressive elitists have long wanted and worked for.

Congress, when still under complete control by the Democratic Socialist Party in 2011, endowed the Dept. of Health and Human Services with $1 billion to provide most of the funding to implement ObamaCare.  This was done to make it harder for the incoming Congress with a House under Republican control to defund ObamaCare.  At the end of the 2013 fiscal year that ended on 30 September 2013, HHS had already spent $811 million of this money and presented the website that will not work and about 20,000 pages of new regulations.  The remaining funds of $189 million will not be anywhere near enough to complete the implementation of ObamaCare.  Yet, Obama will not go to the Congress to get the necessary funds appropriated to finish this process.  No, Dictator Obama will simply take money appropriated by Congress for other purposes and use it as he sees fit to ensure that his signature "achievement" plows on, ripping through the lives of most Americans.

Americans generally, and both Congress and the Federal Courts, must stand up to this dictator and stop him.  ObamaCare is a national disaster of incredible proportion.  An even greater catastrophe would be to enshrine the Great Socialist Dictator as our executive branch leader for all of America's foreshortened future.  History tells us that will be worse than a furious civil war.  In fact, such a war is often the only salvation for such a horrific circumstance.

Is Obama the CEO of the Federal Government and ObamaCare?

Leaving aside the fact that Obama is not eligible to be President because he is not natural born, he is signing legislative bills as though he is the President.  One of the most notorious bills he signed was the fraudulently named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which he has adamantly backed.  Indeed, it is his signature achievement and he is happy to hear it called ObamaCare.  ObamaCare is failing in a colossal manner and it is clear that it is doing so so rapidly because Obama is not a functioning Chief Executive Officer (CEO).  To be sure, it had to fail and it was even designed to fail, but it was not supposed to fail while Obama was still pretending to be President.

The President of the United States of America is the CEO and the Chief Operations Officer of the federal government.  He is charged with protecting, defending, and preserving the Constitution while in office.  Obama does not take this task seriously and does not even believe the Constitution should be protected, defended, and preserved.  He said so explicitly when he was a state senator in the Illinois state legislature in a Chicago radio station interview.  In this, he is in agreement with Justice Ginsburg and many other Progressive Elitist Democrat Socialists.

Under the Constitution, the President is charged with executing and enforcing the laws of the United States.  Obama has failed to do that in the case of his signature achievement, ObamaCare, in many ways.  He has unilaterally changed its timetable on many of the mandates of the law and he has unlawfully granted many exemptions to factions among his supporters, such as labor unions or campaign contributors.

A key development necessary for the ObamaCare initiation was that the state exchanges for health care insurance plans that met the mandated requirements of the ObamaCare law, had to be made available to individuals so they could examine the coverage offered and determine what it would cost them.  To do this, they had to access the costs for their age and location and for their income level so subsidies could be calculated.  In addition, the website has to access data from the IRS, HHS, Social Security Administration, the Dept. of Homeland Security, and other sources to verify the identity of the person seeking the required health insurance costs and the information that individual supplied.  This required a complex program and access website.  The development of this website was entrusted to the Department of Health and Human Services.  The bureaucrats in that department then hired a number of contractors to perform much of the work, but kept a high level of control with ever-changing requirements on how the system would work.  Overlooking this Obama signature project that was taking a large measure of control over one-sixth of the economy and our vital medical care, was the CEO of the federal government.

With all of our lives most literally on the line, the CEO of the federal government was paying no attention at all to his duties.  He was present, but he was busy making speeches about how great ObamaCare was rather than directing his signature achievements development and implementation.  He played the role of company spokesman rather than that of CEO.  According to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Obama had no idea that the website was going to fail.  None.  He was totally asleep at the wheel.  The biggest thing the government has ever done aside from fighting two world wars, the Civil War, and the War of 1812, was not important enough to capture even the least little bit of his attention.

To be sure, the real fault lies with the American People who twice voted for this community organizer with no executive experience to be the CEO and COO of the largest and most important organization in the world.  Then they allowed him to undertake the most massive transformation of the private sector and the American economy to give us the ObamaCare debacle.  Among the consequences of which are:

• Companies are dropping health insurance plans for their employees.
• Insurers are canceling millions of insurance plans that they say do not meet the requirements of ObamaCare, so the cancelled persons will have to buy new plans under ObamaCare.
• Insurers are cancelling the insurance plans of many people with pre-existing conditions.
• People are losing their jobs because providing them with health insurance under the ObamaCare requirements is becoming too expensive.  This will be especially true of young workers, who used to lower the overall cost of insurance to a company far more than they will in the future.  This made it worthwhile to train them and gave them time to learn their jobs.
• Jobs hours are being reduced to less than 30 hours a week.
• High quality medical care institutions are having to fire staff because many ObamaCare health insurance plans will discriminate against them due to their higher costs.  In some cases, as in New Hampshire, people close to good hospital systems will have to travel an hour to get to an ObamaCare covered hospital.
• The many health insurance plans discriminating against high quality medical institutions and their network of doctors will provide lower quality medical care.
• Future innovations in medical care will be much reduced by policy as tougher, more experimental operations and medical equipment investments are denied.
• Administrative costs for health insurance companies are going up due to false and inadequate information being given to them from the malfunctioning exchanges.
• Many young people will not be willing to fight the interminable battle to try to sign up for ObamaCare policies on the malfunctioning exchanges, thereby driving up insurance costs as only the sick and older people have enough incentive to fight that battle.
• Many young and healthy people will not sign up because the magnitude of the subsidy they are providing the sick and older people will shock them.  Paying the penalty tax will be much more affordable.
• Many people absolutely do not want to pay for many of the ten so-called essential health benefits, especially when what they may want is tagged with very high deductibles.
• Many will not sign up because the available plans will not allow them to keep the doctor they like or use the hospital they like.
• Many people will not sign up because ObamaCare violates their religious beliefs.
• Others will not sign up because they are unwilling to allow the government to get away with claiming its owns their bodies and minds, making them slaves.  They will not let the tyrants win.
• Some will not sign up because they know that the government that managed this train-wreck cannot be counted upon to keep their financial and medical data secure.  Not only would that take considerable network security, but huge numbers of people will have access to that data.  Having your bank account continuously emptied is far more crippling than paying the ObamaCare uncaring penalty tax.
• And who wants to be the subject of a Death Panel decision after going to all the trouble to get on ObamaCare?  It is probably safer to fly to Thailand or to Argentina for one's serious medical care.

Making ObamaCare a Power-Luster's Dream

As the 137 agencies and panels are set up and start issuing their many rulings on who will receive health care and who will not and at what cost, the total package of power manipulations of our lives by bureaucrats and politicians will become more clear.  But we have already seen states and certain health care operations acquire special treatment for political reasons in the maneuvers to get the votes to pass the unread, unconstitutional legislation in a most unseemly rush to exert the power of the Democrat Socialist Party.

Since that time, we have seen the Obama Department of Health and Human Services grant 1,372 waivers of a provision of ObamaCare.  These waivers are for one year of the medical expense limit requirements, which are higher than those many company or union health plans now offer.  They can be applied for annually through 2014.  These waivers have been granted to hundreds of union locals, despite the unions being the most vociferous of ObamaCare supporters when it was being considered in Congress.  Apparently many union locals changed their minds when they had a chance to actually read it afterward.  Or were the unions assured ahead of time that they would be granted such waivers as they wanted, seeing as how they were such munificent contributors to the election of the Democrat Socialists?  It is hard to know with this most open and transparent group of political operatives who were running the show in the 2010 Congress and the Obama gang.  Oh, did I say open and transparent?  Sorry that must have stuck in my mind from the election campaign that put these Democrat Socialists in control of our government and they thought of our lives.  I meant to say in this closed, deep-caved, murky regime of moles and voles.

These waivers now cover 3.1 million people.  The Daily Caller reports that:

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Now there are 435 Congressional districts and each has about the same number of Americans in the district.  If 204 waivers were granted equally among these districts, the distribution should average 0.47 per district.  But, somehow, surely just a statistical anomaly, the district of Nancy Pelosi, the ObamaCare prime mover through the House of Representatives, just happened to get 38 waivers or 81 times her district's equal share of waivers.  God must be loading the dice when he sees that the good people of Pelosi's district are so willing to delegate powers to the federal government that they elected this good, god-favored woman to Congress.  But I, not being much of a god-fearer, must note that this is a severe injustice in a nation of sovereign, equal individuals with full rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their minds and bodies, and the pursuit of their personal happiness.  This is the hand of tyranny and it should be no more tolerated than when that hand was the actually lighter hand of King George III.  Under Democrat Socialist rule, there is no such thing as equal individual rights.  No, those are traded for status as either a crony to a powerful politician or the status of the Forgotten Man.  Most of us are forgotten.  I certainly am, unless I am on their enemies list.

One of the remarkable things about the companies getting waivers from Nancy Pelosi's district is that they were expensive, high-end restaurants, hotels, spas, night clubs, and car dealerships.  Apparently many other Congressional districts did not get so many waivers because they just do not have enough wealthy business establishments to compete with Pelosi's San Francisco crony mercantilism companies.  Unless maybe, just maybe, these businesses have special tutoring in how to take advantage of the overly complex and overly belligerent Washington power brokerage system that ordinary Americans will never figure out.  Of course, a call from the office of Nancy Pelosi to HHS head Kathleen Sebelius in her murky subterranean den probably does not hurt either.

Head Start -- Ineffective and Fraudulent

Early studies had found that the Head Start Program, started 45 years ago as part of the "War on Poverty," was effective in helping the children of the poor improve their performance in school.  However, in January a study revealed that the advantage of Head Start for these children had evaporated by the end of the First Grade.  That study was massive and examined a 10-year period of performance on 112 measuring meters.  This ineffective program under Health and Human Services usually has been funded at about $7 billion a year, but Obama had it given an extra $2 billion last year as part of the Stimulus Bill and wants it to have an extra $1 billion this year.  In this time of severe national indebtedness, the ineffectiveness of this program should result in its elimination, but the ever-wrongheaded Democrats are giving it extra money instead.  This is the equivalent of hiring thugs to run around and break people's windows on the theory that they will stimulate the economy by replacing the windows.  The reason is because taxpayer money is removed from productive uses and diverted into an ineffective government program.

A report in today's Washington Times tells the story of an investigation into fraud in the Head Start Program.  Fifteen program locations were visited and child enrollment fraud was found at 8 sites.  Investigating agents posed as parents wanting to enroll their children.  The results:

• In Wisconsin, a "grandpa" and "grandmother" presented their paystubs for proof of income and the school enroller decided to record only the "grandmother's" paystub, because it indicated the smaller income of the two.
• Children were accepted for enrollment with parents making more than $110,000 per year.
• 63 children were counted multiple times to make centers appear to be fully enrolled.
• Proof of employment was ignored.
• Extraordinarily high numbers of "homeless" children were found.  Homeless children are automatically eligible for enrollment.

This program is ineffective and it is run fraudulently as well.  This is a great program to cut.  Of course, doing so would expose any politician to cries that he was hurting the children.  With some guts, the politician can point to the fact that you cannot hurt a child by removing a program that is not helping the child.  This program is merely a pretense at helping children and is a Potemkin village built at great expense only for the benefit of those who run the centers.  We now know that many of those who run the centers are crooks.  So, more than half the real adult beneficiaries of our $7 to 9 billion a year of taxpayer money are crooks.