On today’s edition of the FreedomCast, Avik Roy joins to discuss the sorry I’m not sorry apology from President Obama, how Medicaid expansion is becoming the story no one is talking about and why in order to beat the liberals, we must learn to plan ahead and match their “strategery.” 

Related Links:

Fact Checking the Presidents Kind-of-sort-of Apology for ObamaCare Driven Insurance Cancellations

How Medicaid Fails the Poor

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Follow today's guest, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and contributor at Forbes.com, Avik Roy @Avik on twitter. 

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The federal bureaucracy is an enormous player in policy and politics.

When the Democrats controlled the Senate and the House, they passed ObamaCare.  In order to cobble together enough votes, the law was intentionally left vague and granted enormous authority to the bureaucrats to promulgate rules and regulations.

Today, the law has become worse than a “train wreck.”   Through the deceit and deceptions by Mr. Obama and the manipulations by bureaucrats, millions of Americans have lost their insurance, will be paying higher monthly payments and are exposed to higher deductibles.  Undoubtedly, this“train wreck” is directly caused by our President and his administration.  

Very important for all Americans to know is that this “train wreck” is inherent and integral to all big government programs – banking, environment, welfare and the rest.  Invariably, the disconnect between the makers of the law (Congress) and the implementers (bureaucrats) impairs the mission and intent of the law. Congress passes laws, but is completely dependent on the President and his bureaucracy to implement and report on the status of the law.

The case in point is ObamaCare.  Senator Max Baucus was the main author of the law, but had little knowledge or input over the rules, regulations, waivers, extensions and the hundreds of decisions exerted by President Obama and his bureaucrats.  In a recent Senate hearing, Baucus exposed why government programs invariably fail:

“Make no mistake, I believe in this law. I spent two years of my life working on the Affordable Care Act. There is nothing I want more to succeed.  But months ago I warned that if implementation did not improve, the marketplace might struggle…We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case.”

Speaking to Kathleen Sebelius, the Cabinet Secretary in charge of ObamaCare, Baucus lectures the bureaucrat-in-charge:  “You’ve got to tell us what the problems are.... The more you don’t tell us, the greater the problem is going to be.”

Ah...the curse of big government.  Again, Congresses pass laws, but are completely dependent on the President and his bureaucracy to implement, honestly collect information and apprise Congress, and the public, on the status and efficacy of the law.  

Harmfully and invariably, programs and policies morph at the will and direction of the president and his bureaucracy.  Welfare is a recent example.  The Obama Administration by administrative rule has greatly reversed the intent – work requirements - of the 1996 welfare reform. 

As for environmental policies, remember Solyndra.  It was the bureaucracy following the direction of the President that made all the terrible loans to solar and wind energy schemes.  

Without a doubt, the bigger our government becomes, the less the President has a capacity to be knowledgeable and the bureaucracy's power dangerously expands.  Only a much smaller government with limited to defined functions will stop the continuing “train wrecks” and dysfunctional government.   Of course, this was the intent of the Constitution, which has been undermined by politicians and bureaucrats of all political persuasions – Democrats and Republicans.  

Only when We the People demand small, honest and competent government will America restore liberty and again flourish civilly, economically and culturally.

Obamacare will dramatically increase health insurance premiums throughout Ohio for young and middle-aged men and women alike, based on the most accurate policy data available from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Obamacare premium estimates are not readily available for all ages, but figures HHS has released indicate that Ohioans in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s in every county should expect to pay steep costs for President Obama's signature legislative achievement.

A Media Trackers comparison of Obamacare "Gold" plans from HHS and existing policies with similar deductibles listed at eHealth found that:

• Obamacare plans for 27-year-old female nonsmokers will cost at least $100 per month -- or $1,200 per year -- more than pre-Obamacare health insurance policies in 72 of Ohio's 88 counties.
• Obamacare premiums for 27-year-old male nonsmokers will be at least $100 per month more expensive than pre-Obamacare premiums in 85 of 88 counties -- and at least $200 more per month in 15 counties.
• Compared to pre-Obamacare policies for 50-year-old female nonsmokers, Obamacare plans will cost at least $1,000 more per year in all 88 counties, at least $2,000 more per year in 54 counties, and at least $3,000 more per year in 16 counties.
• Obamacare premiums for 50-year-old male nonsmokers will cost at least $100 more per month than current policies in all 88 counties, at least $200 more per month in 61 counties, and at least $300 more per month in 14 counties.

Statewide annual estimates weighted using county populations from the 2010 Census are shown in the following table.

Obamacare Bronze plans are the cheapest policies for individuals over the age of 30, except in cases of financial hardship; Catastrophic plans are available to those 30 and under. Most Bronze and Catastrophic plans have annual deductibles at least three times greater than the policies quoted from eHealth for this analysis.

Because Obamacare is a redistributive system by design, proponents counter concerns about premiums by pointing to the federal subsidies some Ohioans will receive. A Kaiser Family Foundation study released November 5 estimated that 554,000 Ohioans will qualify for Obamacare subsidies.

For those eligible for the law's entitlement benefits, a portion of Obamacare's astronomical premiums will be borne by taxpayers -- many of whom will also be paying higher costs for their own insurance as a result of the Democrats' latest socialized medicine program.

While Kaiser estimates 812,000 Ohioans will purchase insurance through the Obamacare exchange, dozens of employers across the state have already announced layoffs or cuts from full- to part-time status in order to avoid Obamacare's employer mandate.

Combined with the implosion of President Obama's vow that "if you like your plan, you can keep it," this means more Ohioans than expected may be pushed into Ohio's federally-run Obamacare "marketplace."

The following maps demonstrate exactly how severe and far-reaching Obamacare's premium increases will be for Ohioans in a range of demographic groups. Click each map for further Media Trackers analysis.

As more facts become available to taxpayers, it may turn out that the technological disaster of the Obamacare exchanges at HealthCare.gov is one of the more successful aspects of the 2010 health law.

This story was originally published at Media Trackers.

Thanks to the high-profile efforts of Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and others, including the House majority, there is a stark contrast between the two major parties regarding Obamacare. One party is all-in for it, the other is indelibly etched in the public mind totally opposing it. Republicans would be foolish to change that, but even as Obamacare implodes, that's just what some are calling on them to do.  

Writing at Fox News, for instance, Peter Morici lays out the case for accepting Obamacare and trying to change it.

Republicans should stop cheering for ObamaCare to fail. It may be dreadful, but going back to what we had before is not possible. The real political hay is to be made improving the law to lower prices and premiums -- details Democrats forgot.

The political and policy ramifications of Obamacare are related, but Republicans do not oppose Obamacare simply on political grounds. Making "political hay" is secondary to preserving the liberty and economic well-being of Americans and avoiding out of control federal health spending.

The wheels have come off Obamacare. Even the website will not be ready by December 1; two months after it was launched. On the political level, why would Republicans accept the failed Obamacare now, as Democrats scurry away, and when the reality of government delivery is daily making stronger the arguments for its full repeal? 

There would indeed be a huge political cost to the bait-and-switch of accepting and trying to improve Obamacare. The real schism in the Republican coalition between grassroots idealists and the establishment plotters would grow even deeper. It is exactly the wrong thing to do.

The other problem with accepting and trying to fix Obamacare is on the policy level. Obamacare cannot be fixed. It is built on a broken foundation - price controls and the third-party-payer model. No amount of scheming, plotting, or tweaking can make it right.

Why Obamacare Was Fundamentally Broken

In the effort to mimick the effects of the free market, Obamacare designers used the exchange model that had been developed at the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s in response to Hillary Clinton's total government takeover. Calling that a "conservative" plan is ridiculous, however, since it was merely designed to be less radical than HillaryCare. 

Obamacare's designers then larded up the exchanges with some emotionally attractive but economically disastrous provisions:

• Guaranteed issue, so that no one could be denied a policy based on their "preexisting conditions" -- that is, regardless of risk
• Community rating, so that prices in a county were the same regardless of insurability and with only limited increases for smoking and age
• Very limited tradeoffs between premiums and deductibles -- Bronze plans, Silver, Gold or Platinum
• "Free" preventive services, which were later defined to include all forms of FDA-approved birth control, but under which some cancer screenings are discouraged as too expensive and fraught with error
• A grab bag of mandatory covered conditions, without which the deep thinkers determined a policy was "substandard"
• Another grab bag of taxes to punish people for such things as getting too much health insurance

Those provisions were going to make the insurance more expensive, economic law required it. To make the resulting plans be "affordable", subsidies for insurance companies were added for their customers with low income. The subsidies were to go to directly to the insurance company, not to the individual customer.

The actuaries in government and the insurance industry crunched the numbers and said that even with the subsidies, there was no way people would buy the Obamacare insurance policies. The whole thing had to be made mandatory.

That's where the mandates, including the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and the self-insured essential benefits mandate came in.  Every individual had to have insurance of the type Obamacare specified. Every employer had to offer it, or be bankrupted by punitive taxes. Every employer who was already self-insured had to add the expensive Obamacare benefits, or pay a draconian fine.

That's a simplification of the program.

Few pieces can be removed before the Tinker Toy model falls the rest of the way apart. 

What Obamacare Opponents Should Do

It is a false choice between accepting Obamacare and going back to the pre-Obamacare system, which was already overregulated. As much as I dislike the weak slogan "Repeal and Replace," that is what needs to happen. Obamacare should be fully repealed, and -- after careful study and debate -- gradual, consensus reforms introduced to undo the damage governmental involvement has caused to date.

During this reform process, there's no doubt the left will try to add more and more government control to the health care system, because they believe government control makes everything better. We will be far better off both politically, and in national policy starting over than trying to rebuild the sandcastle while the tide comes in.

Legislative and activist pressure is needed therefore to dismantle the law piece by piece, attacking the least popular parts of this unpopular program. Rather than accepting Obamacare, which is both bad policy and bad politics, we must continue to attack it until it can be fully repealed. 

Democrats will resist any changes to Obamacare, because they know that without any one of the major components, the implosion will be all the more apparent.

Calls as Morici's for us to give up freedom in the name of containing health care costs should ring hollow for every American, particularly those claiming to speak for limited government. Because even if a top-down governmental system of price controls and managed care could control costs, and even if it could provide better care, it would make us less free in a fundamental way. That's not a fair tradeoff.

Republicans should avoid such nonsense, and continue attacking Obamacare.

Every Senate Democrat in office in 2010 was the deciding vote for Obamacare.

Without the vote of any one of the Senate Democrats, Obamacare would not have become law. They voted unanimously in support of the rule that forced insurance companies to cancel policies.

As it stands, Democrats are responsible for Obamacare -- all of it -- its rules, its cost, and every page of regulation. Without them, it would not exist.

Continue efforts to repeal this awful law, and make those responsible for it pay politically for what they have done. 

Image credit: NY Times

What have we done?  Let me start by saying that I do not believe we didn't have problems with the health care system in America prior to ObamaCare - we did - big problems. But, what I want this post to highlight is what we have done, in order to solve the problems. When I say "we" I actually mean them: Democrats, Barack Obama and every technocrat and central planner who decided it would be a good idea to try to "fix" a system which was providing affordable access to care for over 94 percent of Americans. 

The third party payer system (employer based coverage) has disguised actual health care costs from consumers since its inception during World War II. It's a left over product of price controls, implemented primarily by progressives, and is one of the chief factors in the rise of health care costs.  

ObamaCare was supposed to fix rising costs and address these issues through private "marketplaces," also known as state exchanges, and provide affordable care for the 46 million Americans reportedly without health insurance. Keep in mind, health insurance doesn't equal access to care.  

First, let's take a look at that number, the 46 million without insurance. In 2009, FreedomWorks did an analysis of who is actually without coverage in America. I encourage you to read the entire report.

The primary conclusion of the detailed report was that around 16 million Americans, or roughly five percent of the population struggled to either afford health insurance, or were not eligible and already covered under a private plan or public plan. That's a number far lower than the 46 million the Obama Administration touted during the push for the "Affordable Care Act. 

"They have an unfailing belief in their technocratic brilliance." 

On today’s edition of the FreedomCast, Charles Cooke joins me to discuss the numbers game that the Obama administration is playing with ObamaCare enrollment, how expanding Medicaid may sound compassionate but has not proven to enhance health or longevity for its recipients, and why the smartest guys in the room keep getting it wrong. 

Related Links:

Obama's Numbers Racket

The Single Payer Fantasy

How many are really uninsured?  The FreedomWorks Issue Analysis from 2009

Humility vs. Conceit - Will Cain 

Subscribe to The FreedomCast on iTunes here.

Follow FreedomWorks on twitter and on Faceboook.

Follow today's guest, writer at the National Review @CharlesCWCooke on twitter. 

Our podcast is fabulously produced by @BradWJackson.

The basic principle behind the rule of law is that all laws must apply to all citizens equally. Unfortunately, Congress is trying to subvert this principle with regards to Obamacare.

FreedomWorks members are being told that Congressmen, Senators, and their staffers can keep their federal health insurance subsidies. Several concerned citizens have received similar letters back from their legislators about this issue.

One such response says the Office of Personnel Management’s regulations “clarify that, like other large employers under the [health care] law, the federal government must continue to make the same contribution to congressional employee premiums as they do now, regardless of whether the employees are enrolled in [the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program] or receive their insurance through the marketplace [i.e. the Obamacare exchange].”

This is misleading. Other large employers are allowed to contribute to their employees’ health care plans…unless the employee bought their plan from the Obamacare exchange. Since all members of Congress and their staffers are required to buy insurance from the exchange, they should not be entitled to an employer contribution. If Congress is allowed to keep their taxpayer-funded subsidies, then they will be cutting themselves a deal that no other citizen can receive.

While the best solution would be to exempt all Americans from Obamacare, the next best option is the Vitter-DeSantis bill. The purpose of this bill is to make sure that Congress receives the same kinds of subsidies as everyone else. In addition to upholding the rule of law, it will force Congress to experience the same hardships that other Americans must endure under the Affordable Care Act, which will make them more likely to seriously reform the law.

During a recent conference call with bloggers to promote his bill to allow Americans to keep their current health insurance, Senator Ron Johnson told the story of a woman who is battling lung cancer and her husband who is recovering from prostate cancer. Both are enrollees in the soon to be extinct Wisconsin high risk insurance pool for patients with pre-existing conditions. The Wisconsin couple is not looking forward to seeing its "substandard" annual insurance costs double to nearly forty thousand dollars under Obamacare. 

Stories of unnecessary hardship caused by Obamacare are happening across the country and have been relayed numerous times on the pages of this blog. Former Obama supporters and political agnostics are up in arms when they discover not only that President Obama did not keep his promise to allow Americans to keep their current health insurance, but he lied repeatedly about his intention to do so. To make a bad situation worse, President Obama tried to deflect blame by pointing his finger at insurance companies whose crime was to abide by the law that President Obama signed. President Obama blamed the American people as well for being foolish enough to purchase "substandard" health insurance in the first place.

Given all this, you would think Republicans would be able to take advantage of the situation and use the opportunity to begin to roll back Obamacare in some meaningful way. Senator Johnson's bill is an attempt to do that. In fact, there are reports that a Senate Democrat who represents a southern conservative state is considering a similar proposal. 

Yet, when Senator Johnson was asked whether he is working with Senate Democrats to advance similar proposals, the answer was no. When asked what his strategy was for forcing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to schedule a vote on his bill before the end of the calendar year when Obamacare goes into effect, Senator Johnson's answer was to help elect more Republicans so Republicans can take control of the Senate in 2014. 

I am not opposed to electing conservative Republicans, but the 2014 elections are a year away. In the meantime, we should be working to chip away at this terrible law by any means available to us. 

The website will be fixed eventually. Michelle Obama's college friend may not know how to build and maintain a functioning website but there are internet entrepreneurs in the United States who do. Further, while private health insurance enrollment may be proceeding slowly through the health insurance exchanges, Medicaid enrollment is not.  Medicaid expansion will continue to drain state and federal budgets while providing substandard care. 

Since many Senate Republicans are unwilling to take the larger step of pushing to defund Obamacare in whole or in part, they must embrace smaller steps like Senator Johnson's bill and tie their passage to must-pass pieces of legislation like the budget. If we keep kicking the Obamacare can down the road until 2014 or 2016, it may be too late, especially for the couple in Wisconsin.

As the month of October has rolled on and stories regarding the train wreck that is Obamacare mount, one has to wonder when President Obama's media allies will come to the rescue and skew reality on health care reporting.

The answer may be ... now.

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) is once again teaming up with a private U.S. foundation known as the Commonwealth Fund. The Fund, a self-described ‘progressive’ organization, is currently led by David Blumenthal, former senior health adviser to the Obama campaign.  The group makes little to no secret of their support for Obama's universal health care plan. 

The Commonwealth Fund's relationship with an organization that deals with supposedly objective journalists is a rather cozy one, offering specialized teletraining to reporters at the SABEW, as well as thousands of dollars in grants for meetings designed to train reporters on how to properly cover the Affordable Care Act.

On October 28th, the SABEW held a special teletraining session for their reporters called, Health Care 101:  How will the Affordable Care Act impact open enrollment?

A description on the SABEW web site reads in part (emphasis mine):  

"This call explores some of the issues surrounding enrollment, including whether or not employees will look at their enrollment options in a different light given the Affordable Care Act.  Our panel of experts review the issues journalists should be paying attention to and offer up story suggestions and reporting tips aimed at both general assignment writers and those on the health care beat."

There are three guests who participate in the call.  Sara Collins, vice-president of the Health Care Coverage and Access program at Blumenthal's organization. Karen Pollitz, former national health reform worker at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Reed Abelson, business reporter from the New York Times.  Not exactly a fair and balanced panel.

Abelson appears to have been adequately swayed by her fellow progressive speakers today, co-authoring a shocking counter to the general consensus that Obamacare's sticker shock is rampant amongst health insurance customers, in a report titled, Millions Eligible For Free Policies Under Care Act.

Tom Blumer at NewsBusters points out that reality lies underneath the sensational headline, or rather many pages later, when it is revealed "that the 'free' plans have annual out-of-pocket cost limits of $6,350 for individuals and $12,700 for families."

In addition to the teletraining, SABEW and the Commonwealth Fund are hosting a two-day symposium at Reuters headquarters in downtown Chicago on November 7th and 8th.  The event will be presented to a select number of journalists, providing them with "specialized education in health care reporting." Those journalists hail from such outlets as Bloomberg News, CNN Money, the Associated Press, Forbes, the New York Times, and of course Reuters, to name a few.

Similar events have been conducted in tandem by the two groups in the past, but this will mark the first time the Commonwealth Fund has been firmly guided by President Obama's former health adviser, Blumenthal.  In addition to his work on the Obama campaign, Blumenthal served as chief health adviser to the Dukakis campaign in the '80s, and was later appointed to the administration as "national coordinator for health information technology" in 2009.

With over 3,200 members, including entire business wings at major newspapers, the SABEW’s acceptance of training from this clearly partisan group is questionable.  The first rule under a section titled Code of Ethics on the SABEW site instructs their members to "avoid any practice that might compromise or appear to compromise objectivity or fairness.”

While the Fund’s pro-Obamacare agenda is their own business, journalists being asked to cover the law based on training and education sessions developed by such a group may have their objectivity and journalistic integrity called into question.  At least they should.

Please follow Rusty on Twitter @rustyweiss74

Governor Kasich (R-OH) is taking flak from conservatives for his plan to expand Medicaid in his state. Not only have his actions been foolish and irresponsible, but he also violated the principle of representative government and even broke the law in order to implement it.

Medicaid has been repeatedly proven to be a poorly run and ineffective program. Medicaid recipients do not see improvements in their physical health and Medicaid patients who undergo surgery are also at a greater risk than those without insurance. I could go on about how Medicaid will actually cost more for the states that have expanded it under the new health care law or that there is no guarantee that the federal government will keep its promise to reimburse states at 90-100% of their added costs, but I really want to focus on the shady tactics Kasich used to expand Medicaid.

Earlier this year, the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature passed a budget that prohibited Governor Kasich from expanding Medicaid without approval from the legislature.  Instead of respecting the will of his constituents, the Governor used a line-item veto to remove that stipulation.

Knowing that he could not force Medicaid expansion through the Ohio General Assembly, Kasich decided to push Medicaid expansion through by using a virtually unknown committee, known as the Controlling Board, in an attempt to bypass the legislature. This board consists of the Director of Budget and Management, the Chairman of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and four more members of the General Assembly.

The fact that Governor Kasich went to the Controlling Board is unconstitutional. According to Article II of the Ohio Constitution, “The legislative power of the state shall be vested in a General Assembly consisting of a Senate and House of Representatives but the people reserve to themselves the power to propose to the General Assembly laws and amendments to the constitution, and to adopt or reject the same at the polls on a referendum vote.” Although the board is mostly made up of members from the General Assembly, it does not have the same legislative authority.

Also, the purpose of the board is primarily to transfer funds within executive agencies or for emergency purposes, but it is specifically prohibited from acting “for the purpose of effecting new or changed levels of program service not authorized by the general assembly.” Since the legislature voted on a budget that prohibited the governor from expanding Medicaid without their approval, the board clearly overstepped its authority.

There is a glimmer of hope for constitutionalists, however, because a major lawsuit has been filed to block this action. If the plaintiffs win, it would not only keep Ohio free of the gigantic financial burden of Medicaid expansion, but it would also uphold the rule of law.  However, if the Ohio Supreme Court upholds Governor Kasich’s actions, its consequences would reach further than Ohioans’ pocketbooks. It would send a signal to future governors that they can pass whatever laws they want and blatantly ignore the will of the General Assembly.