Thursday, November 21, 2013

 

Wreckers Redux

Mötley Crüe groupie Bob Cesca jumps in with both feet to the journo-list approved talking point that Republicans are sabotaging Obamacare the ACA here. I had never heard of Mr. Cesca but Google tells me he is a product of Kutztown State in poli sci, an autodidact regarding the American Civil War and an author or a book, One Nation Under Fear, that is currently selling for $.01 at Amazon and is ranked 1,834,485 in the best selling books there. How many books are listed on the Amazon best selling books list, 1,834,486? Here we go.

Lost in the mix, of course, is the ongoing far-right effort to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.

I'm not talking about the myths and propaganda -- the "death panel" nonsense and the like. This is serious business: the well-financed, broadly implemented sabotage campaign designed to rig the law for failure, while also making it more difficult for Americans to receive insurance.

"Rig the law for failure?" Wouldn't that be what the Democrat drafters did?

Wreckers, Hoarders, Saboteurs, Republicans.

Any new "evidence" of the actual existence of this well-financed sabotage campaign?

However, earlier this month, we learned that Republican Party leadership directly urged those governors not to [open state exchanges]-- chiefly to burden the federal exchange with a heavier load.
I think the advise was chiefly to avoid any direct Republican contact with the train wreck law, but this is not new and not evidence. To be constitutional, the ACA could not force states to open exchanges and the Governors who so declined made a legal, rational, honorable choice. Not sabotage.

Worse yet, the ACA contained zero funding for the development and implementation of the site, and there's no way the congressional Republicans would ever authorize more money for it. It's unclear why the federal exchange was unfunded in the law, but one thing's for sure, a House of Representatives that voted 46 times to totally repeal the law wouldn't have coughed up a dime to rectify the oversight.

The ACA contained a Billion dollar fund for implementation and it is clear that the implementers could have used the unlimited state exchange implementation funds as silence in the law in this situation is not prohibition.

"It's unclear why the federal exchange was unfunded in the law"? Are you kidding? The Democrat drafters negligently left it ambiguous. Is he implying the completely-shut-out-of-drafting Republicans used magic to cause the drafters to screw up? Much of what he says after this is magical thinking, but is this? Also, the Democrats didn't even try to get more funds (because, Lord knows, a Billion just doesn't go as far as it used to). Their not even trying is the Republicans' fault? Really?

So, what happened? A cash-starved Healthcare.gov development process, which precipitated serious glitches when October 1 rolled around -- problems that should never have occurred.
Is Mr. Cesca incapable of writing a complete sentence? Where is the verb telling us what the Healthcare.gov development process did? No wonder his book is not worth a dime. And only a Democrat could think a Billion dollar appropriation was "cash-starved." So if the state exchanges had unlimited funds (and they did) they must all be hunky dory, right? No? Not even can-do, eager beaver Oregon's? The Democrats screwed up all the exchanges to varying degrees and lack of funds had nothing to do with it.

And those glitches might've been exacerbated when right-wing hacktivists reportedly conducted "denial of service" attacks against Healthcare.gov -- deliberate attempts to overwhelm the website's servers. CNN reported on Monday:
Hackers have attempted more than a dozen cyber attacks against the Obamacare website, according to a top Homeland Security Department official. The attacks, which are under investigation, failed, said the official. Authorities also are investigating a separate report of a tool designed to put heavy strain on HealthCare.gov through a so-called distributed denial of service. It does not appear to have been activated.

This is new, but is it evidence. Do we have any evidence that the hackers are Republicans and not just the usual lefty/vandal/anarchists? Any evidence at all? No?

Cesca goes on to note that some Governors did not agree to expand Medicaid coverage. Very old news and not sabotage. Let's remember that all states were forced by the ACA to expand Medicaid and the Supreme Court struck that down as unconstitutional. Here is Cesca's penetrating analysis of an example:

In Alaska yesterday, Governor Sean Parnell, a Republican, obviously, rejected the Medicaid expansion thus denying health insurance to 40,000 Alaskans. Parnell said, "I believe a costly Medicaid expansion especially on top of the broken Obamacare system is a hot mess."

That's a lie. Fact: the federal government pays the entire cost of the Medicaid expansion for 2014 through 2016. The states pay nothing. So it's not costly at all. In fact, it's free for the first three years.
Only a Democrat could look at federal taxpayer support and call it free. The sad truth, unmentioned by Cesca and every other Democrat broaching this subject, is that after three years the states who agreed to the expansion have to cover an ever higher portion of the cost of ever more Medicaid recipients and the expansion soon becomes fiscally unsupportable.

What happens when the expansion is blocked throughout more than half the nation? Potentially millions of pissed-off working class Americans due to what's perceived as punitively expensive Obamacare premiums -- premiums that are only too expensive because Republican governors blocked the Medicaid expansion.
We'll skip over the fact that the second sentence, the answer to the question posed in the first, has no verb, again, so that it makes no sense grammatically, and go directly to the extraordinary leap semi-posed in the "sentence." Obamacare premiums go up because a totally different program did not expand? Is that the gist of this moronic paragraph? Well, allow me then to retort. What?

He goes on to accuse Republicans of using money and social media to inform (untruthfully?) their fellow citizens about the myriad problems with the ACA, other than the completely dysfunctional roll out and web sites. The bete noir of the left, the Koch Brothers, somehow appears as part of this visceral and sinister conspiracy to sabotage.

But wait, isn't Free Speech, talking to other people, a good thing? Isn't it a cherished right of all Americans? Used to be. I suspect Mr. Cesca would counter that Free Speech is not unlimited, such as yelling fire in a crowded theater. (I counter the fire/crowded theater dodge with this. If you are telling the truth, and there is a fire, you ought to darn well bring it to everyone's attention. You clearly have a constitutional right to do so. If you're lying, and there is no fire, you still have a constitutional right to yell it, there can be no prior restraint, but you may well be held responsible for damages people suffer in the panic caused by your lies. So the exception ought to be 'can't falsely yell fire in a crowded theater.') And regarding lies about Obamacare, the Democrats start off in a deed, deep hole if they want to start trading accusations of people lying about the ACA.

At the end of the day, if not enough people enroll in the exchanges, the law entirely falls apart. Combined with everything else, that's sabotage, plain and simple, while the Koch brothers can rest assured knowing they'll never be without quality healthcare, so screw it. Let fly. After all, the traditional press won't really cover it with the same hard-nippled vigor with which they've covered the buggy website, or with which they've almost universally blamed the low enrollment numbers on the president.

This complaint about media non-coverage is rich coming from a Democrat. It takes a special type of delusion to think the media is biased in favor of the right. But let's look at the first sentences.

At the end of the day, if not enough people enroll in the exchanges, the law entirely falls apart. Combined with everything else, that's sabotage, plain and simple...

If the people don't sign up to the ACA in the numbers the law's supporters want and expected, wouldn't the most likely explanation be that the product produced by the genius class drafters of the law is just not that popular? Is it really likely that the Republicans could somehow prevent people from purchasing desirable, affordable, better, cheaper health insurance?

If so, the force is strong with these Republicans.

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