By Marc Miller
The Obamacare catastrophe continues as the Affordable Care Act has hit yet more difficulties in the path to implementation. Only this time, the president isn't apologizing for it, nor is he expressing confident optimism that it will be fixed sufficiently in the near future: he's blaming Republicans.
While speaking on Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, President Obama opted to place blame on the Republicans for failure to resolve major issues in his signature health care plan, including the roll-out of the health care exchange website.
Obama declared, “One of the problems that we’ve had is that one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure and that makes the kind of iterative process of fixing glitches as they come up and fine-tuning the law more challenging.”
Yet, while the president and democratic strategists have focused on the website, more issues that have been lurking in the background, and are slowing being revealed: one of them has to do with the IRS and fraud. This concern came up on Tuesday, after the issuance of the inspector general’s report.
On Tuesday, the inspector general’s report disclosed that the IRS was finally ready and able to issue tax credits accurately for Obamacare participants, but that they don’t yet have a solution in place to circumvent fraud. The report said, “The ACA Program has not yet completed a fraud mitigation strategy.” So, while the IRS is the one who actually collects tax on your income, they still haven’t figured out a way to keep people from underestimating their income and grabbing health care subsidies they don’t qualify for.
In addition to the IRS issues, there are also confidence challenges, as more and more communications from the White House turn out to be the polar opposite of what is actually occurring in the marketplace, or within the Obamacare framework. For instance, as recent as Wednesday, the Council of Economic Advisers put out a statement that directly conflicted with a press release distributed by the largest trade association in the health care insurance industry – on the subject of health care spending and the Obamacare legislation.
While the end of the world drama of 2012 had turned out to be false, do US citizens have to stock up survival equipment now?
According to Jason Furman, Chairman of the CEA, the Affordable Care Act is an integral part of the recent spending slow-down, as it is “a very important part of the structural story” that helps reduce Medicare over payments.
Apparently the health care industry doesn’t agree that the system is on track. Their letter, released the very same day, overtly criticized the administration and the legislative and regulatory actions implemented over the past few years, and boldly stated that because of this, they were destined in the future for severe underfunding.
“If you like it, you can keep it” was just one of the many missteps of the President regarding Obamacare – and there are few way left to spin the fact that not only are people continuing to lose the health care coverage that they were told they could keep, but that even more people are losing coverage than are signing up on the exchanges.
For the first time on Tuesday, the RealClearPolitics Average of the top polling companies logged the President’s Job Approval Rating as just less than forty percent – the lowest it’s ever been. The cold, hard truth appears to be resonating with the American public: Obamacare is a disaster.
