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The Ultimate Identity theft victim; Barack Hussein Obama.

by Guest Post ( 2 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Marxism, Progressives, Special Report at December 24th, 2013 - 2:00 am

Guest Blogger: Dorian Grey

Since it’s infamous debut the Obamacare website has been nothing short of a genuine epic fail. Nearly a billion dollars spent to build a website that crashed, failed to do what it was designed to do, and provided less security than a Microsoft Operating System set to default.

Anyone who thinks that every malicious hacker, scam artist and cyber-criminal on earth hasn’t already infiltrated the Obamacare website just hasn’t been paying attention.

John McAfee predicts hackers will empty Obamacare enrollees’ bank accounts

Obamacare websites have “no safeguards” to protect Americans who enroll in the health insurance exchanges from hackers who will “empty your bank account,” according to internet security pioneer John McAfee.

McAfee said he could create a fake Obamacare exchange website for “a couple hundred dollars” and expect a big return on the scam.

“I’ll ask you your social security, your date of birth, [so] an hour later I can empty your bank account,” he told Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson.

“And this is going to happen, it’s going to happen soon. Nothing in the Obamacare system safeguards against this,” he said.

The interview was a follow-up to McAfee’s conversation with Fox’s Neil Cavuto last week.

“There is no central place where I can go and say, ‘OK, here are all the legitimate brokers and examiners, for all of the states,’ and pick and choose one,” McAfee told Cavuto.

“[I]nstead, any hacker can put a website up, and make it look extremely competitive, and because of the nature of the system — this is health care, after all — they can ask you the most intimate questions and you’re freely going to answer them.”

Make no mistake about this, there are tens of thousands of hackers and cyber-criminals out there patiently waiting for Barack Obama to sign up for Obamacare. He is the ultimate prize for the Blackhat hacker or cyber-criminal.

Of course, when he does become a victim of identity theft, and if he signs up for Obamacare as he keeps promising, that most assuredly is a when, not a if, then he, the FBI and the entire US Government will of course cover it up like they did what really happened in Benghazi or with Operation Fast and Furious.

White House: Obama to enroll in ObamaCare today

So says Valerie Jarrett, but we’ll see. Think the exchange will stay up long enough? Maybe we should start a pool:

President Obama plans to enroll in ObamaCare on Monday, the final day for individuals to purchase insurance so they are covered by Jan. 1.

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett signaled the president’s intention to purchase coverage in a phone interview with American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan. …

In recent weeks, White House press secretary Jay Carney has said that the president still planned to enroll, but refused to give details of when that could occur.

“I know that he will and has said that he will — the White House has said that he will — but I don’t have an update,” Carney told reporters earlier this month.

Asked what the president was waiting for — and whether his attempt to enroll in the exchange would be open to members of the press — Carney laughed.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said.

Will Obama bring a laptop to the White House briefing room and let reporters watch him as he successfully enrolls in his own health-care program? Don’t hold your breath … and the President shouldn’t hold his, either. He might need it for when he calls into the help line and has to explain his situation a few times, and then gets assistance in filling out a paper form. Can he use an autopen for that?

This might be tougher than you’d think. Barack Obama will have to enroll through DC Health Link, and that exchange is separate from Healthcare.gov. (If he uses his Chicago home as his residence, he’d use the separate Illinois exchange.) The DC exchange has been so problematic that Congress had to issue an extension to its own staffers two weeks ago. Our friend and current Ted Cruz speechwriter Amanda Carpenter provided a colorful account of her own travails on the exchange before finding out that it would be another month before it could be relied upon to work properly.

He’s not going to be alone, either. Today’s Deadline Day for everyone, and CBS says that Obama’s administration is “scrambling” to avoid another embarrassing collapse:

Efforts range from the practical – a big message on HealthCare.gov that tells people they should enroll by Monday to ensure their coverage starts on time – to the creative: the District of Columbia government dispatched someone from its health exchange, DC Health Link, to one of the city’s gay clubs to sign people up.

After the rocky rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchanges, which led to very low enrollment numbers in the first month, the administration has been actively seeking ways to ease the sign-up process ahead of the Dec. 23 deadline (people will be able to enroll in the federal exchanges until March 31 to avoid paying a penalty). On Friday, President Obama announced that 1 million people have enrolled for insurance so far – a huge jump from the end of November, when just 365,000 had signed up, but still far short of the administration’s initial target of 3.3 million enrollees by the end of the year.

How confident is the administration of success today? This confident:

Then, on Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote to a group of senators saying she will issue a “hardship exemption” from tax penalties for people whose plans were cancelled but were not able to purchase new insurance by the deadline.

They’ll find a way to declare victory no matter what, of course. Getting back to President Obama, he won’t have to worry about his own health care no matter what happens, as Jim Geraghty explains:

As the old saying goes… yippie kay yay motherfucker, nobody on earth is more deserving of becoming a victim of identity theft than you.

(Cross Posted @ The Wilderness of Mirrors)

Tags: Identity Theft, Obamacare
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Marxism, Progressives, Special Report | 2 Comments »

Cognitive dissonance and ObamaCare

by Mojambo ( 152 Comments › )
Filed under Health Care at December 17th, 2013 - 7:00 am

cognitive dissonance: mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information.

The elites in major cities did not realize – or refused to realize – that they were the ones who had to pay for other people getting Obamacare. More of then then not that meant their their own insurance which they received through professional associations, would be canceled.

by Richard Fernandez

Professionals, artists and intellectuals in New York City, after years of struggling to obtain favorable terms from the health insurance industry, now find their efforts negated by Obamacare. Anemona Hartocollis relates the plight of the Big Apple’s elite in the New York Times.

Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.

They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market. …

But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage….

The predicament is similar to that of millions of Americans who discovered this fall that their existing policies were being canceled because of the Affordable Care Act. [……]

These developments have precipitated a mini-cultural crisis in this exclusive set. How could this happen to us?

“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.

“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”

“Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.”

Had she but known? But she must have known. People at this level of talent must have suspected the reality from the first, though some part of their psychology prevented them from facing it. Unlike low-information voters, they can add. Simple arithmetic would have shown that from the beginning Obamacare, in order to work, needed access to a source of funds that would enable it to pay for the uninsurable or those unwilling to buy insurance.

Meinwald and her friends had those funds.

When Obama announced he was inviting people who could not or would not pay for healthcare to the feast, that necessarily meant the bill would have to be stretched over those with money in their pockets. And the NYC elite made the cardinal mistake of having some jake in the first place. The fact that they were successful doomed them. [……]

This is called a transfer payment. This is called redistribution. You may want or not want it, but you cannot pretend that redistribution does not redistribute.

If Ms. Meinwald wanted to avoid getting slugged, her group should have imitated Detroit. When you’re bust, you’re off the hook. No stash, no tab. Or, as classic Marxian theory puts it, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Of course the modern Democratic Party has rewritten the slogan slightly to “from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed,” but that’s a mere detail; that’s progress for you.

What Meinwald may get is intangible. She’ll get first-class illusion. Illusion, Nathan Glazer once wrote, is sometimes a damned fine thing. Responding to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s argument that humans are unequal in The Bell Curve, the Harvard sociologist argued in the New Republic that “some truths may not be worth knowing. Our society, our polity, our elites, according to Herrnstein and Murray, live with an untruth. I ask myself whether this untruth is not better for American society than the truth.”

Leaving aside the question of whether this applies to race, Glazer’s objection certainly applies to the liberal enterprise in general. Reality is cold; it is full of unwelcome news. People are always dying of cancer; or don’t have enough money to pay for everything they want; or wake up to read that China has landed a probe on the moon. Stuff happens and to solve it requires competence. To pretend to solve problems using only a teleprompter requires a big slug of illusion. [……..]

If self-deception were free it would be easy. Glazer’s argument that it was better not to know the truth was of course anticipated by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the fable of tyranny as heroic fantasy. In that story the merciless old Inquisitor is outraged to find that Christ has really returned to earth, but he finds that Christ’s message of freedom and voluntarily love will disarrange the obscurantism they have so successfully sold the low-information faithful. And so he has Christ clapped in irons for the crime of telling the truth. [………]

And so it is with us moderns. Obamacare will never work on an actuarial basis. It replaces a bankrupt set of programs like Medicaid, with its bankrupt self. But at least we can fool ourselves into thinking it actually does something.

The only difference between the Grand Inquisitor and modern liberalism is that the Inquisitor knows the bill will come. Not just in this life, but possibly also in the next from the Wise Spirit. From the things that don’t exist according to the liberal creed which purposely defines them out of existence, the better not to think about it. Modern liberals claim they would have voted for Romney had they but known the truth.

But they always knew the truth. And now the truth is here, so pay up.

Read the rest – If I can fake it there, I’ll fake it any where

Tags: Obamacare, Richard Fernandez
Posted in Health Care | 152 Comments »

In Other News, Water Is Wet

by Flyovercountry ( 106 Comments › )
Filed under Healthcare, Marxism, Progressives at December 13th, 2013 - 7:00 am

Every day now, I can see the liberal talking heads on television extolling the new found successes and virtues of Obamacare. If it weren’t so gosh darned sad, it would all be funny. Proof of how Americans have been thirsting for this of course can be found in the numbers of those who have visited the website, once it was fixed, and announced for its grand reopening. I can hardly type this with a straight face. Seriously liberal talking heads and pundits, if you want me to consider at all what you’re saying, both now or in the future, you’re going to have to make a valid point at least once in a while.

You passed a law that requires every man, woman, and child, in the land to log onto your website should they not have current coverage, and that further got many of them dropped from their existing coverage, and then touted people cruising your exchanges as proof that they wanted it. That’s sort of like claiming that people pulled over for DUI arrests are proof that Americans want breathalyzer tests based on the number of people who submit to them when prompted by the police. Putting that aside for the moment, there’s more to the story here, in terms of the statistics used anyhow.

From the Wall Street Journal Article:

Most of Washington seems to have bought the White House claim that the 36 federal exchanges are finally working, and glory, glory, hallelujah. But if that’s really true, then what explains the ongoing secrecy and evasion?

On Wednesday the Health and Human Services Department continued its Victorian-era strip tease and allowed a glimpse into the Affordable Care Act’s “enrollment” for November. Out of respect for a free press, reporters ought to boycott these releases because they’re so selective that they reveal little about real enrollment. But we’ll try to parse the data as best we can without the White House high gloss.

A charitable reading suggests that ObamaCare’s net enrollment stands at about negative four million. That’s the estimated four million to five and a half million people who had their individual health plans liquidated as ObamaCare-noncompliant—offset by the 364,682 who have signed up for a plan on a state or federal exchange and the 803,077 who have been found eligible to receive Medicaid.

HHS is boasting of enrollment for November that was four times as high as October, yet 62% of the total was in the state exchanges, some of which are marginally less prone to crashing than the federal version. Then again, 41 states posted sign-ups only in the three or four figures, including eight states that run their own exchanges. Oregon managed to scrape up 44 people. Among the 137,204 federal sign-ups, no state is reaching the critical mass necessary for stable insurance prices.

The larger problem is that none of these represent true enrollments. HHS is reporting how many people “selected” a plan on the exchange, not how many people have actually enrolled in a plan with an insurance company by paying the first month’s premium, which is how the private insurance industry defines enrollment. HHS has made up its own standard.

Insurers know that the hardest part of doing business in the individual market is getting customers to write a check. People are accustomed these days to automatic payroll deductions and the unseen lost wages of employer-sponsored insurance. Many Americans may enroll on the exchange but then fail to pay once they see monthly costs that could range from the equivalent of a cellphone bill if they qualify for subsidies (President Obama’s favorite comparison) to premiums that can exceed $1,000 or huge deductibles for the unlucky who must overpay to finance the insurance of others.

To date, less than 15% of those who selected plans have actually cut the first check to become actively enrolled, which is the industry standard for participation. The White House’s standard is far less stringent, and denotes only successful completion of the shopping cart experience and selection of a plan. The problem of course for the Administration is that the actual bills being sent to the prospective insured are in no way reflective of the quotes being given at the time of selection. “Problems,” with the back end have seen people quoted with figures of up to a 50% discount from the actual bills being sent. Another problem of course is that the deductibles associated with these plans are often not matching up with what has been quoted, or not explained in sufficient detail by the spiffy government obfuscation site. The 15% number by the way is in addition to the net increase in uninsured Americans alluded to in this article. Words of how great this failure is, escape me at the moment.

I have two videos here from PJTV, both of them Trifectas. I guess that if there were a silver lining with Obamacare, and even typing that has made me throw up a little in my mouth, it would be watching every single prediction made by conservatives about what would happen were this crap hole of a law to find itself implemented has proven itself to be true. Less people are covered than were covered without it, and that’s only going to get worse, it costs more at every phase of its implementation, and not one single promise made by those who inflicted this upon us has turned out to be true. This law has proven beyond all doubt that government is never the solution, it is only ever the problem.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.

Tags: Obamacare
Posted in Healthcare, Marxism, Progressives | 106 Comments »

2014, The Year Of The Squirrel

by Flyovercountry ( 161 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Marxism, Progressives at December 11th, 2013 - 12:00 pm

Watch this video on YouTube.

From day one of the Obama regime, flitting about from crisis to crisis has been the new normal of American life. We started with worries about Swine Flu, which for reasons of political correct idiocy was subsequently renamed H1N1. That of course paled in comparison to the financial crisis, which was one of the main ingredients of Obama’s election in the first place. The next crisis was the continuing recession, and massive job layoffs. Then we got another crisis in the form of our borrowing limit being approached, which led to the threat of a government shutdown and a budget crisis. rampant unemployment continued through to now, and there were fires aplenty set all over the Middle East, all against the constant back drop of Iran spinning their way furiously towards attaining a nuclear weapon. The Chicken Little Presidency has been ruled by one simple premise, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

During the last 9 weeks, something has happened to America, sort of like the very insightful description of us by a Japanese Admiral who had planned and carried out the most successful attack against our military at any point during our history. While being congratulated for the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto replied, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve,” prophetic words indeed. It may take us a while as a people to awaken, but when we do, we are capable of greatness. Following up on yesterday’s theme in which I explored the eventual path followed by all cult leaders, without exception, Barack Obama’s signature achievement will also be his undoing.

Hopety Change aside, all the American People actually voted for in two Presidential elections in which The Zero won our top executive post were a few cleverly stated slogans, some empty platitudes, and the expulsion of white guilt. They had no idea that President Zero would ever actually succeed in passing along his incredibly destructive agenda, mainly because he never truly spelled it out for anyone. When Obamacare passed, they showed their anger with the 2010 midterms, but the anger passed because the law itself didn’t really take effect until a full year after the 2012 Presidential election.

But then October of 2013 happened, and man these last 9 weeks have been popcorn worthy. First of all, to date we’ve spent over a Billion Dollars on an online shopping cart that doesn’t rise to the level of junior high programming skill. Over 50 Million Americans will lose their health plans this year, and when the employer mandate kicks in next year, you’ll see another 100 Million join that club. This year’s lucky winners have seen that the new and vastly improved ACA compliant policies cost anywhere from merely double to triple for unbelievably inferior coverage, which of course contains new deductible limits that insures in most cases, not one single penny in benefit will actually be paid. The extra cost for the insurance will be funneled to a government bureaucracy in the form of excise taxes, license fees, oversight, regulation, and compliance costs. The insurance companies started this exercise out fitting the legal definition of financially distressed for merely offering up plans, and now that the young people in our country have demonstrated that they may understand math after all by not signing up for this lunacy, they are really going to be in trouble. Next year’s winners of course, who will be forced into the exchanges once the employer mandate kicks in, will be facing premiums that start out at a mere 600% increase for inferior coverage. I suspect that they may be angered by this.

what we have now is a Liberal Party in panic, and a President who can see that he is in real danger of not being able to remain in front of the mob that he’s been whipping up. this next year, the one who’s penultimate event will be the midterm elections of 2014, will be a continuing effort by our President and his minions to distract us in any manner possible. We saw the first effort at that with the recent Organizing For America led protest of fast food restaurants, who’s only crime is running profitable businesses, serving a clientele that appreciates the service and product, and succeeding despite the poor business climate sought by the Marxist in charge.

I don’t know what the distractions will be, just that they will be plentiful, and constant. I suspect that class warfare will be at the center of most of them, as this has been a favorite theme of The Zero from his earliest days with the gift of speech. (His very own autobiography lists Frank Marshall Davis as one of his earliest mentors.) What I do know is this, it is not just our job as Conservatives to keep from being distracted, but to help our fellow citizens from also looking for the squirrel as well. I also know that I would put nothing past these people. After all, they had a meeting at the White House two weeks ago in which they discussed how they were going to deal with America’s dissatisfaction over the problems with the Obamacare debacle, and the demand for a $15 per hour minimum wage was what these geniuses came up with. The truth is that for 72 hours, it worked, sort of.

Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.

Tags: Obamacare
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Marxism, Progressives | 161 Comments »