Team Obama's scary message for ObamaCare's critics
By Liz Peek
November 19, 2013
Fox News
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Are you afraid of the Obama White House? If you challenge the president’s beloved health care plan, maybe you should be. Consider the fate of William White, the Washington, D.C. Insurance Commissioner, who voiced skepticism about President Obama’s hastily assembled “fix” for the millions losing their insurance policies.
A day after suggesting that the new demands on insurers could destabilize the marketplace and lead to even higher premiums, White was canned.
Telling the truth about ObamaCare is risky.
Remember the manhandling of Congressional Budget Office head Douglas Elmendorf? When the supposedly neutral bean counters undertook the first analysis of ObamaCare ’s fiscal impact, their preliminary findings threatened to undermine the happy talk flowing from the White House. Elmendorf was summoned to a parlay with the president, who doubtless explained how the budget gurus might amend their analysis, as a patriotic duty.
Not long after, budget chief Peter Orszag issued a further warning to the CBO, saying it should guard against “exaggerating costs and underestimating savings.”
Any surprise that the cost estimates from the CBO have made generous assumption -- underestimating the number of Americans to receive subsidies and who will be added to Medicaid roles? I will guarantee that as this bill takes hold, costs will exceed those projected by the CBO.
Pity the poor insurance companies (if you can.) Hauled into the White House only after the president decided to live up to his promise that Americans could keep their existing insurance, they were effectively thrown under the ObamaCare bus.
Now it’s their problem that millions have lost policies that did not comply with ACA mandates; they will either figure out a way to undo the work of the past three years in just a few weeks or will be battered – ”bad apples indeed!” -- by a defensive White House. Photos of that gathering reveal the president lecturing on the benefits of the temporary do-over, while industry executives glumly take their medicine.
They have seen how this White House functions. Early in ObamaCare ’s sorrowful struggle, insurers like Anthem Blue Cross in California dared whisper the truth – that they were forced to raise rates because of the ACA mandates. The company found itself targeted by the president on a “60 Minutes” segment, and then required to justify its rate-setting by HHS head Kathleen Sibelius, who also demanded the firm explain where the increased revenues would be spent – an unheard-of intrusion.
Sibelius also went after America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a national trade association, demanding that they stop “using scare tactics and misinformation to falsely blame premium increases for 2011” on the ACA. She also threatened “there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation…”
Insurers must be scared to death. They’ve seen what can happen when a collaborator – like one-time golden boy Jamie Dimon – turns foe. The president once called JP Morgan CEO Dimon “one of the country’s smartest bankers” – but that was before the former Obama supporter went public in his disdain for what he called the White House’s “constant attack on business.”
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