Sunday, November 03, 2013

Under Pressure From The White House, NBC Throws Its Reporter Under the Bus and Censors News That Obama Wrote Regs to Disqualify and Terminate Health Insurance Policies
...This is not just about having knowledge that events beyond Obama's control would unfold -- this is about events directly at his control. Regulation-writers are executive employees, and as such, answer to the president and not Congress.

This means Obama has the actual power -- not the puffed up, falsely asserted unconstitutional power, but the genuine legal power -- to call this agency and tell them, "We sold this bill as permitting people to keep their insurance; please re-write the regulations in a way that will honor this promise."

Remember, regulations are supposed to add details to the spirit of the law. They are not supposed to change the meaning of the law. Obama's regulations -- written at his behest, or at least with his connivance -- change the meaning of the law to render the "grandfathered policy" provision a nullity.

Via Politico, the White House began pushing back against this story. Not because it was untrue, but because it was politically lethal....

...The White House is taking the position that even a minor escalation in policy premium -- something that always happens, given the constant inflation in health care insurance costs -- constitutes a "new policy" which is then not grandfathered.

This is absurd. A regulation could easily be written that any escalation in premium equal to less than the rate of health care inflation + 1% will be considered the same policy and thus grandfathered. They are deliberately writing the regulations to disqualify the maximum number of policies, because they want to force the maximum number of people into the exchanges, which are, effectively, high-risk pools, and need a lot of healthy bodies to have any shot at solvency.

And any policy that is cancelled can then have its rates forcibly jacked up by ObamaCare, in order to subsidize others.

After this pushback, NBC deleted paragraph 3 without noting why they had done so. ...

...But why was it deleted in the first place? Why did NBC decide to trust the Obama Administration on this -- obviously a party that stinks of self-interest and potential deceit -- over its own reporter, who got it right?

I really want to stress this to everybody, because no one seems to get this yet:

These regulations, being a creature of the Executive branch, can be rewritten by the executive branch at any time. We don't need a law for this (though one would be useful, to force Obama to do the right thing).

Obama has it within his power to call up the HHS reg-writers and instruct them to honor the promise he made time and again for two years. And he doesn't want people to know this, because he is determined to break that promise.

That promise was always a lie, and not a meaningless lie at the periphery, but a central lie propping up the political campaign for ObamaCare. Had he told Americans that they would be losing their current health care in order to be dumped into what is effectively a high-risk pool, so that they could subsidize high-risk clients, the public would have rejected the law even more strongly than he did.

So he lied. And lied. And lied. And lied some more.

And even at this late date, he could still choose to honor his promise.

But he won't, because he can't -- he always intended to take people's insurance away from them. Always. And he's not going to undo, short of a veto-proof act of Congress....

On Obama's Devious Regulations to Force the Terminations of All "Grandfathered" Health Care Plans
...The Affordable Care Act as written and passed would have protected the grandfathered plans for a longer period of time and with more freedom for adjustment, but the Obama administration filled out the Secretary Shalls in such a way as to make that much harder, if not basically impossible, to do. The Obama administration’s original, June 2010 rules were actually even stricter, and would have, for example, made it impossible for an insurer or company to change the firms it uses to manage and administer the plan (which needn’t affect coverage and is a simple way to lower costs); those ludicrous restrictions were eliminated, but enough rules remain that it’s, again, near impossible to maintain a grandfathered health-care plan....