Crash And Burn - Obama Waives Individual Mandate On ObamaCare

I can't help laughing out loud at this, schadenfreude though it may be.

President Obama has made the 14th illegal change to 'settled law' (please, my sides!), of course without consulting congress.

Our Dear Leader has now decided to suspend the individual mandate provision of ObamaCare for a year or possibly even longer:

The Obama administration will not require the millions of Americans who received health-insurance plan cancellation notices to purchase a new policy next year.

They’re granting those consumers an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, a Department of Heath and Human Services spokeswoman confirmed. The mandate requires everyone to have health insurance or face a tax penalty, the greater of $95 or 1 percent of income in 2014.

The administration will also allow those consumers to sign up for catastrophic coverage. Those bare-bones plans are available to people who are under 30 or qualify for a “hardship exemption.”

But since there are now no fines to pay, why would anyone bother to buy catastrophic insurance..since they can just purchase it when they have that car accident or find out they've contracted a disease? And without the mandate (an unconstitutional tax) of course, there's no way to pay for ObamaCare anyway except more government spending, and quite possibly a tax payer bail out.So much for another lie we were told, about how ObamaCare was going to lower the deficit.Remember that one?

Let's look back at how this progressed. First, President Obama and his team as well as a number of Democrat members of congress lied to the entire nation knowingly about how people who were satisfied with their current healthcare would be able to keep it.

Meanwhile, the president was handing out waivers to the politically connected and to government bureaucrats at state and city levels. And when major corporations voiced discomfort over what ObamaCare was going to do to their bottom lines, the president illegally changed the law to postpone the employer mandate until after the 2014 midterms.

Then, when the lie became became apparent about Americans being able to keep their policies if they wanted to and people's policies began being canceled by the busload, we were told that by the president and his team that ObamaCare was a great bargain with great, affordable coverage. And our Dear Leader told us (in the midst of a ludicrously self-serving non-apology) that all he was doing was trying to protect us from 'bad apple insurance companies' with lousy, inadequate policies. You see, we were all just too stupid to realize how bad those policies we liked were and what an amazing boon our Dear Leader was giving us.

Congress and their staffers didn't share that opinion and screamed bloody murder, so the president allowed a change in the law again and let them have a 70% subsidy to cover their precious behinds.Oh, and President Obama? He likes his healthcare just fine thank you. And he's going to keep it. He's yet to sign up for ObamaCare, and neither has his family. That's for, you known, his inferiors.

As people realized what lousy coverage ObamaCare actually was going to offer them at as much as ten times what they were paying before, and as even more policies got canceled, President Obama changed things again, saying that he would allow those awful insurance companies to issue those rotten policies the peasants loved so much, but without changing thew law, leaving those companies open to lawsuits and litigation if he changed his mind again!

Needless to say, they weren't anxious to fall into that trap. Aside from the fact that the policies no longer existed because of the new law, and actuarial rates had already been set for 2014. So that even if the companies wanted to bring the new policies back, it would have cost them millions of dollars in administrative costs on top of the millions they had already spent tooling up for the restrictions imposed on them by ObamaCare over the last three years and exposed them to serious liability and financial loss.

Meanwhile, the big ObamaCare roll out turned out to be one of the biggest fiascoes in American History. At a cost of almost a billion dollars and with three years to put it together, the company the company this president gave a no bid contract to - with of course, an Obama donor and an old crony of the First Lady at the wheel - put together a garbage website that still lacks the capability of even allowing people to actually buy the overpriced garbage coverage ObamaCare is selling. All they can do, provided they get lucky and the site is actually up is to 'register', inputting all their personal data to a site with totally inadequate security provisions and able to be accessed by 'navigators' who aren't even given a criminal background check before they're hired. And with good reason, because a lot of them come straight from ACORN, where fraud was a game everyone could play.

So now, having destroyed millions of people's insurance coverage, created havoc in the industry, cost people their jobs and the cutting of their hours to comply with ObamaCare's insane diktats and wasted literally billions of taxpayer dollars, our Dear Leader has now decided he'll allow people to buy a bare-bones catastrophic plan instead. While destroying any incentive for them to do so even if they wanted to, because these plans aren't going to be able to be created, assessed by actuaries for risk, written up, billed correctly and made available for purchase on a website that still doesn't work in the remaining 11 days of 2013.

And as Avik Roy notes, the catastrophic plans the president is allowing are hardly better than no coverage at all.

Thanks to this president, far less people have insurance coverage today then did before he slithered into the Oval Office.

Like the coward he is, the president announced this at a rare news conference. On a Friday afternoon, of course. During which the Obama website went down . Again.

Ya Basta. Enough.

If President Obama actually worked for a living as any kind of executive for a private company or even a non-profit, he would have been fired a long time ago for sheer incompetence and possibly imprisoned for criminal fraud.If he was a realtor, a stockbroker, a doctor or a lawyer, he would have been disbarred or had his license to practice yanked ages ago. And if he were a military officer who commanded an operation with this level of ineptness and sheer dishonesty, he would have been cashiered and tossed out of the service on his rear end and possibly even do some stockade or brig time.

And this is just one of his colossal failures.

We don't put presidents in jail, and that's both logical and proper. But henceforth, I am not going to take seriously anyone whom suggests that this president shouldn't be impeached. Nor will I take seriously from now on anyone who says that impeachment isn't richly deserved and warranted, or that it would not be the best course for the country.

While the political circumstances don't allow for it just yet, they very well may soon, provided the Republican Party doesn't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again. In fact, it would restore a considerable amount of my respect for the Democrats if they put country ahead of party and made this a bipartisan effort, unlikely though that may be.

It's high time we sent President Barack Hussein Obama packing. In fact, it's long past time we did so.