BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
So the lobbyist beat the Obamacare supporter in the special election in Florida?
And the race wasn’t even that close.
David Jolly, a former lobbyist and former Staff Member to Congressman Bill Young, beat Alex Sink, a pretty well-known and well-funded Democrat who seemingly and improbably embraced Obamacare during the Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Young people are knuckleheads. That’s what the First Lady said on Jimmy Fallon last night.
Thanks for the clarification.
Michelle Obama was making the case that younger Americans need to wise up and sign up for her President’s health care plan. They don’t know how to cook and often slice their fingers on sharp knives. That is why young people need Obamacare.
Or they could buy Neosporin and a band-aide. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
Over the past three weeks the Congressional Budget Office (better known as the CBO) has made a great deal of news.
First, opponents of Obamacare (of whom I am one) pointed to a report at the beginning of February in which the CBO seemed to claim that the law would cause the loss of some 2.3 million jobs over the next three years.
It appears that what the CBO really said was even worse: The jobs will be there but more than two million people will find it financially more beneficial to sit at home and watch NCIS reruns, leaving home only to get their prescriptions for medical marijuana filled. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
I thought that the best thing – maybe the only good thing – about 2013 is that it is a prime number. But it’s not. There are three prime number factors of 2013: 3, 11, and 61. So, it didn’t even have that.
So many people, groups, organizations, and institutions have failed this year that it is difficult to find one that is held by Americans in anything other than what Winston Churchill called “minimum high regard.”
In a Gallup poll taken mid-year only three institutions – the military (76%), small business (65%), and the police (57%) – got marks higher than 50% on the question: How much confidence to you have in the following institutions? Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
A phrase that haunted the Nixon Administration (in addition to “I am not a crook”) was his claim that he was representing what he called, in a 1969 speech, the “Silent Majority.”
A phrase that will haunt the Administration of President Obama will likely be the “Vast Majority.”
You may have read, seen, or heard about the fact that the homepage of Obamacare – healthcare.gov – was nowhere ready for prime time when it launched on October 1, 2013. After stumbling and bumbling through an embarrassing press conference to explain how that might have happened his team came up with a date, November 30, by which it would be working smoothly. Continue reading
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com
One of the more interesting things about working on Capitol Hill was learning what big words mean when luminaries such as Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker and just about every other famous economist or technical expert came to testify in Congress.
‘Disintermediation’ was one of those words. We heard a lot of it on the House Banking Committee when the S&L industry melted away between 1985 and 1990. We also heard a lot of it during the financial meltdown of 2008 when commentators on CNBC repeatedly talked about the threat of ‘disintermediation’ on financial giants such as Wachovia (which passed away) and Bank of America (which somehow survived, albeit with massive taxpayer-supported federal help). Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
Since the grand opening of Healthcare.gov – the federal home of Obamacare – on October 1, 2013, the federal government has been able to sign up only 26,794 people.
26,794 people is something short of what the Administration of Barack Obama had hoped for, had sneered at Republicans for doubting, and had assured the American public it was on target to produce.
Put another way, after spending over three years and, according to the Washington Post, between $170 and $300 million (just for the website), the geniuses at the Department of Health and Human Services have been able to sign up the equivalent of the entire population of … Carbondale, Illinois (Pop. 26,241).
If you’re looking for something to compare all this with, Amazon.com gets about 4.3 million unique visitors – per day; almost 129 million per month.
According to NBC News, HHS has had a “goal of 7 million newly signed up by the end of March” 2014. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
“Authenticity is vitally important in politics. If you can fake that, you have it made.”
That’s an old Washington joke. Ha Ha. You might be able to fake authenticity, but you can’t fake credibility.
And that’s a problem for President Obama.
His credibility is now shot, thanks to the provable lie that helped him pass his signature legislative achievement.
When the President promised that the American people could keep their health care insurance under Obamacare, he knew he was lying. But the voters bought the lie, hook, line and sinker. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
You can fix a website. You can’t fix Obamacare.
At least, you can’t fix Obamacare easily.
It is not clear yet if the problems that currently plague the Obamacare website are an early indicator of a program that is going to be a wild success or an unmitigated disaster.
You can make the case that the problems that have plagued the program are caused by a system that is oversubscribed, that too many people want to get into it and that is why it crashed. You can also make the case that this situation is endemic of a law that has been poorly thought out and will never work in the real world. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
I didn’t believe the polls in 2008. I thought there was a secret group of voters who would come out to vote and propel John McCain to the White House over Barack Obama.
I believed the polls in 2010 because I thought that the American people were all on board to reject the President’s signature achievement, Obamacare.
I didn’t believe the polls in 2012. I thought the methodology was wrong. How could they oversample Democrats so much and how could independent voters skew so much towards Romney and have him still losing? Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
I’ve been doing a lot of TV since the shut down began. Specifically I’ve been doing one or both of Anderson Cooper’s programs at 8 PM Eastern and/or 10 PM Eastern.
In almost every one of those programs whoever is to my Left says that President Obama has been elected twice on the program of ObamaCare and, as ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, Republicans should back off, roll over, and accept their fate as having lost the Presidency in 2008 and 2012.
There is something to that. I’m not sure I remember either election turning on the fulcrum of ObamaCare but that might be because Mitt Romney didn’t have a good answer opposing ObamaCare because of the Massachusetts plan that was adopted when he was Governor – ObamaCare lite. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
I was driving in to work this morning and listening to WTOP, the news radio station, with traffic on the eights, and I was stuck in terrible traffic.
Go figure.
But I was sitting there in the traffic, waiting for the traffic news to come on at 8 minutes after the hour, and I heard the latest story about Obamacare.
No, it wasn’t about the government shutting down over Republicans objections to Obamacare. It was about Obamacare itself.
And as it turns out, according to WTOP news radio, Obamacare is going to be a nightmare if you happen to want to actually get health care with your new health care law. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
President Barack Obama, fresh from having his lunch money taken from him by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is flailing about trying to find someone he can shift the public’s attention to.
He has chosen House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh) as the person and the upcoming end of the U.S. government’s fiscal year on September 30 as his verbal weapon.
I think that is the wrong fight against the wrong guy.
The last time we were headed down the road to actually shutting down the federal government was in late 1995 and early1996 . Two main players – and this is important – were President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Passing a debt limit extension is hard.
The Democrats like to talk about how the Republicans should pass a clean debt extension. And then they like to run campaign ads against Republicans who vote for a clean debt extension.
Denny Rehberg, the Republican Congressman who ran for the Senate seat in Montana, found that out the hard way. So did George Allen, who ran against Tim Kaine.
Democrats ran ads hitting both Allen and Rehberg for voting to extend the debt limit, just as their President was beating up Republicans for not voting to extend the debt limit.
Hypocrisy runs so deep with the Democrats in Washington that they aren’t even self-conscious about it. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
What issue will dominate August of 2013?
1. Will it be war?
In 1914, as Barbara Tuchman wrote in the Guns of August, war dominated the discussion, more specifically, the First World War. The Great War, as it was called until the Second World War, forever ushered in modernity, with all of its terrifying warts.
We were allies of the British in those wars, but in the War of 1812, they burned the Capitol building in August.
When I first started on Capitol Hill, war invaded August when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Viet Nam War officially started in August when the Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Continue reading
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com
“Health insurance has suddenly become affordable in New York,” said Elisabeth Benjamin, Vice President for health initiatives with the Community Service Society of New York.
“It’s not bargain-basement prices, but we’re going from Bergdorf’s to Filene’s here. The extraordinary decline in New York’s insurance rates for individual consumers demonstrates the profound promise of the Affordable Care Act,” she added.
Well, since everyone in New York seems to be right all the time, just as in the NY Times recent screed against the new initiatives and policies undertaken by the GOP majorities in the state legislature and from the Governor’s Mansion, we guess whatever New Yorkers say about everything has to be true.
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com
Everyone was all a-twitter last weekend when a lower level deputy Treasury secretary, not President Obama, announced in his blog, (not the President’s) that the onerous employer-mandate section of Obamacare (just that part, nothing else) was going to be suspended for a year.
Until after next year’s mid-term elections.
Of course. More political gamesmanship from this President on health care. Every time there is a ‘cost’ associated with Obamacare that gets pushed to the out-years while the bennies of Obamacare get shoved to the in-years from day 1 (coverage of children til age 26, etc). Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Just imagine if George III had told the colonists that he would delay for one whole year the implementation of the Stamp Act, the tax that Parliament imposed on the colonies to pay for its worldwide war against the French.
Do you think the colonists would have decided to pack it in and not break away from England?
In many ways, the Obama Administration is trying to do just that with its suspension of an Obamacare mandate on the business community.
The White House is giving employers a year reprieve, as if a year is going to make much of difference for most business operations.
BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com
$20.
That is all it takes to get a person to do something different when it comes to health care cost containment.
We found out yesterday from a veteran of medical billing services that everyone ‘says’ they want their own doctor, their own prescriptions from their local pharmacy, their own local hospital….until they can find the same level of service somewhere else for $20 less.
So much for ‘loyalty’ in the medical field, huh? Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Originally Published in The Hill.
The healthcare train currently chugging down the tracks is going to crash, and it is not going to be pretty.
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the Senate Finance Committee chairman who helped design the healthcare reform bill signed into law by President Obama three years ago, was the one who initially called it a “huge train wreck.”
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, characterized the law as “beyond comprehension.” Continue reading