What’s interesting in the news today?

1. The hits from the CBO just keep on comin’.

From TheWeeklyStandard  “Remember back when the Democrats tried to sell Obamacare to a skeptical citizenry as health care “reform” that would cost “only” $848 billion—far less than a trillion—over a decade?  Indeed, that was the alleged 10-year gross cost of Obamacare’s coverage provisions, according to the Congressional Budget Office (see Table 3), when Harry Reid, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu, Al Franken, Mark Udall, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Begich, Mark Warner, and the rest of the Democrats rammed President Obama’s signature legislation through the Senate on Christmas Eve without a single Republican vote.  That 12-digit price-tag was widely cited by the New York Times and other sympathetic outlets, who treated it as gospel, even as conservatives observed that it was clearly a sham number.

 Well, now the CBO is out with a new report on Obamacare’s costs, and—sure enough—its 10-year price-tag now eclipses $2 trillion.  To be more exact, the CBO now projects (see Table B-1) that the 10-year gross cost of Obamacare’s coverage provisions will be a cool $2,004,000,000,000.00.

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2. What?!

Shockingly it appears that giving people free stuff creates a disincentive for people to work.

Huh. That’s not what the President says.

From CNSNews  “The subsidies that help low-income people buy expensive health  insurance are a ‘disincentive for people to work,” Douglas Elmendorf,  director of the Congressional Budget Office, told Congress on Wednesday.

“What  the Affordable Care Act does, is to provide subsidies focused on lower-  and lower-middle-income people to buy health insurance. And in order to  encourage a sufficient number of people to buy an expensive product  like health  insurance, the subsidies are fairly large in dollar terms.  Those subsidies are then withdrawn over time — withdrawn from people as  their income rises.

“And by providing heavily subsidized health  insurance to people with very low income, and then withdrawing those  subsidies as income rises, the (Affordable Care) Act creates a  disincentive for people to work, relative to what would have been the  case in the absence of that Act,” Elmendorf told the House Budget  Committee.

He added that the subsidies “make those lower-income people better off…but they do have less of an incentive to work.”

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3. Meanwhile enrollees are continuing to hit snags at the doctor’s office.

From TheLATimes  “A month into the most sweeping changes to healthcare in half a century, people are having trouble finding doctors at all, getting faulty information on which ones are covered and receiving little help from insurers swamped by new business.

Experts have warned for months that the logjam was inevitable. But the extent of the problems is taking by surprise many patients — and even doctors — as frustrations mount.”

“To hold down premiums under the healthcare law, major insurers have sharply cut the number of doctors and hospitals available to patients in the state’s new health insurance market.

Now those limited options are becoming clearer, and California officials say they are receiving more consumer complaints about access to medical providers. State lawmakers are also moving swiftly to ease some of the problems that have arisen.”

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4. Another unhappy customer.

From TheNYPost  “ObamaCare was supposed to help me. That’s all I could think as I sat in the House of Representatives last Tuesday night as the guest of my congresswoman, only a few hundred feet away from President Obama as he gave his State of the Union address. Four years ago, I’d have been there cheering for ObamaCare’s passage. But the real ObamaCare has made my life a nightmare.”

“My plan was canceled last fall. According to the regulators behind ObamaCare, it was a subpar plan that should no longer be sold to consumers. Another 16,000 Tennesseans on the same plan were similarly dumped. Many, like me, liked their plans and wanted to keep them.

This wasn’t my insurer’s fault at all. CoverTN actually fought for me to keep my health care. After I received my cancellation notice, the folks at CoverTN requested that the federal government give them a waiver, which would let them grandfather my plan into ObamaCare. Their request was rejected.”

“For me, the impact of ObamaCare is a health plan that is both unaffordable and uncaring. For a law named “The Affordable Care Act,” this is both backward and perverse.”

$6,000 more a year, less benefits, less choices, and she lost her doctor. Also note that the “evil” insurance company went to bat for her to keep her lower priced plan, yet it was the govt that denied her.

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5. Just a reminder to voters in states with Democrat Senators up for re-election. It’s time to make them pay at the polls. Vote them out.

From RollCall  “Every vulnerable Senate Democrat up for re-election in 2014 voted with President Barack Obama at least 90 percent of the time in 2013, according to CQ Roll Call’s latest vote studies, released Monday.

Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor broke with the president most often, opposing him in 10 percent of all 2013 votes where the administration stated a preferred outcome. Sens. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, Mary Landrieu, D-La. and Kay Hagan, D-N.C., voted for Obama’s position 97, 97, and 96 percent of the time, respectively. Of those four, only Begich serves with a Republican who has bucked the GOP to back Obama with any frequency. (See our Jan. 21 story.)

Support for Obama’s initiatives from incumbent Democrats who are favored but not safe was just as high if not higher than from vulnerable members: Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Mark Warner of Virginia supported the president in 99 and 97 percent of votes.

On the flip side, Republican senators who are wary of primary challengers from the right opposed Obama so often that the president’s support from GOP senators in 2013 — 40 percent — was the lowest of his five years in office. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opposed Obama 67 percent of the time. Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., Thad Cochran, R-Miss., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, opposed the Obama position on 66, 50, 48 and 66 percent of votes respectively.”

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6. The President and his minions tried to keep their harassment of Tea Party groups hidden from the public.

From CNSNews  “Mich.). In a hearing on the IRS-Tea Party scandal on Wednesday, Chairman Camp questioned IRS Commissioner John Koskinen about the Treasury Department apparently crafting rules to limit the ability of conservative and Tea Party groups to get 501(c)4 exemptions to engage in public debate.”

“In his questioning of Koskinen, Camp also noted that e-mails showed that IRS officials in Cinncinati, Ohio first started flagging Tea Party applications in February 2010 because of “media attention” and apparently not because there was any confusion over the application rules for a 501(c)3 or (c)4 group.

In an e-mail from Feb. 25, 2010 from Cincinnati IRS official Jack Koester to his boss, Screening Group Manager John Shafer, Koester says, “John, Here is the case number for the ‘Tea Party’ application for 501c(4) exemption that we discussed this morning. Recent media attaention to this type of organization indicates to me that this is a ‘high profile case’.”  Then part of the e-mail is blacked out, redacted.”

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7. The CBO is also warning that the plummeting workforce participation rate will have an adverse effect on the economy for a long time. This is Obama’s economic legacy. Like the rest, a failure of leadership.

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “When Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf appeared before the House Budget Committee on Wednesday, there were plenty of lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, who wanted to make points about Obamacare. Republicans stressed the CBO’s finding that Obamacare will create such a sharp disincentive to work that Americans will stop working to the tune of 2.5 million full-time jobs. Democrats tried to cast doubt on the number or, alternately, to suggest that Americans leaving the work force because they no longer need a job to secure health coverage would be a good thing.

The points had been pretty much exhausted by the time Republican Rep. Diane Black got her turn to address Elmendorf. Her question was straightforward: “What effect [will] the reduced labor force participation have on the economy?”

“Elmendorf’s answer was simple, short, and devastating. “It is the central factor in slowing economic growth,” he said. “After we get out of this current downturn, but later in this decade and beyond, the principal reason why we think the economic growth will be less than it was for most of my lifetime will be a slower rate of growth by the labor force.”

He used it for political gain to fraudulently lower his unemployment numbers, but the economy will suffer long term because of it.

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