Originally published November 20 2013
'Obamacare dozen' fleeing for political cover as grand socialist plan evaporates by the day
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) The world of politics is nothing if not cynical and hypocritical. One-time allies can turn on you in an instant, if the polling data says it's a good idea to turn. Alliances are a mile wide and an inch deep. And so it is with the Democrats who voted for Obamacare and are now scrambling for an escape hatch.
A dozen or so Democratic senators up for re-election next year are beginning to panic, as the president's signature legislation continues to break promises, under-deliver and, quite literally, imperil the lives of Americans who are losing health insurance plans - many of them chronically ill.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal:
Fifteen Senate Democrats plus Colorado's Michael Bennet who chairs the Senatorial Campaign Committee sat down at the White House [recently], and they want all and sundry to know that they let President Obama have it. Alaska's Mark Begich put out a statement saying he chewed out the big cheese for "absolutely unacceptable" mismanagement and "an understandable crisis in confidence." He must have drafted it in advance.
Oregon's Jeff Merkley chimed in to report that even after the two-hour encounter session that was not on the public schedule, he was still "very frustrated" and "I remain deeply convinced that this is a 'show-me' moment." Asked by Politico if Democrats were losing credibility, an anonymous attendee said, "You got to have it, to lose it."
Obamacare vote cost the House its Dem majority
According to various reports, President Obama reassured the nervous Dems that he would fix things and for them not to worry. But that's also what he said in 2010, when they voted to support Obamacare's takeover of the healthcare industry. Bill Clinton and others said much the same thing: "Chill. We got this."
Then again, the "moderate" Democrats who comprised the Nancy Pelosi majority went on to lose race after race in what became the biggest turnover of House seats since the Great Depression.
Obama at the time said, once the health insurance exchanges all launched, things would be well. The world would be as one, and the Democrats' angst would melt away like constitutional government.
And we know how that turned out.
Now, the WSJ reports, Obama is "urging Democrats to keep calm because the public will love it once the subsidies start to roll out. Yet insurance is being cancelled, premiums are surging and patients like Edie Sundby can't keep their doctors."
And in the meantime, the liar-in-chief has been exposed as a fraud. But even then, the master went on to defend the indefensible, to claim - beyond belief to all but his most ardent defenders - that he never really said what he really did say over and over again.
Now, Democratic nervousness has turned into desperation.
"All of which has the ObamaCare Dozen - the Democrats who each cast the decisive 60th vote and are running for re-election in 2014 - fleeing for political cover. We offer a list of the dozen nearby, and they're right to worry that voters might punish ObamaCare's implementation as they did its passage. But so far the 12 are trying to pull off nothing more than confidence tricks," WSJ reported.
The Jeanne Shaneen Plan
Shaheen is leading a coalition that is asking for an unspecified extension of Obamacare's March 15 enrollment deadline. Among those backing this strategy are Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mark Udall of Colorado. Shaheen's quest is particularly important to her personally, given that her state's joint federal-state exchange, whose narrow network includes only 16 of the state's 26 acute-care hospitals, has so far seen just one insurer sign up to participate.
But her plan only offers temporary respite. Also, exchange premiums are based on assumptions of a full year's worth of coverage. Such premiums could likely not cover claims if people either delay or forego signing up next year. That would make rates spike once more the following year.
"All of this would also give the exchanges a stigma as untrustworthy, more so than even Health and Human Services incompetence," the paper noted.
Obama himself has offered an extra-legal "fix" of his own - allowing insurance companies to continue offering the same plans they were forced by the law's minimum coverage mandates to drop, in exchange for a promise that his administration won't enforce that part of Obamacare, but only for a year.
But can they? The companies would be writing and issuing health insurance plans that are still illegal under the law.
Democrats are certainly in a quandary for supporting Obamacare, but they should be. It is a horrible law and anyone who voted for it and continues to support it should be held politically accountable in 2014.
Sources:
http://online.wsj.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com
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