Jimmy Kimmel has an Obamacare solution for America.
Even though no one in Jimmy Kimmel’s audience apparently signed up for Obamacare despite all the hoopla, on Jimmy Kimmel Live , the host suggested an alternative for trying to navigate HealthCare.gov. His satirical solution: Obamacare-Care .
By way of introduction, when there weren’t any studio audience members who their hands and instead laughed, the host said “Really? They claim that more than three million people have now signed up on healthcare.gov website. Maybe they have; I don’t know,” See embed below.
“Whatever you think of universal health care, the whole thing definitely hasn’t been working as well as it should be,” Kimmel observed in something of an understatement.
Much has been written about Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, including the botched HealthCare.gov rollout (and similar glitches on the state-level exchanges), as Kimmel’s skit alluded to.
Other developments sprung on the American people include cancelled coverage despite promises to the contrary, consumers being forced to pay for benefits they don’t want or need, skyrocketing premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, exchange enrollments that have gone missing, and exclusions from existing provider networks. Some employers have rightly or wrongly dropped health coverage entirely or cut back on staff to avoid getting entangled in Obamacare mandates. Plus all the delays and postponements and exemptions, along with waivers for politically connected individuals and groups.
In the long run, separating health insurance from employment may be a good thing in terms of portability, provided the coverage is truly affordable.
Given all the unilateral changes made by the feds in Obamacare that many legal scholars believe are unconstitutional without the approval of Congress, the hostility toward US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) seems otherworldly — at least in retrospect. When Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and others tried to delay or defund Obamacare, they were bitterly denounced and ridiculed on both sides of the political aisle, as well as in the media, because Obamacare was “the law of the land” and shouldn’t be messed with.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRKFwj8RHcM
While organized labor was among the most vocal supporters of Obamacare, two major unions recently expressed their dissatisfaction with the Affordable Care Act. Officials with the Unite Here union (hotel and restaurant workers) and the Laborers’ International Union of North America — with a combined membership of about 800,000 — in a letter to Democrat leaders on Capitol Hill said that they were “bitterly disappointed” with the Obama administration. This is because the law “subjected union health plans to new taxes and mandates while not allowing them to share in the subsidies that have gone to private insurance companies competing on the newly created exchanges.”
Unite Here President Donald Taylor said that “We want to hold the president to his word: If you like your health-care coverage, you can keep it, and that just hasn’t been the case.”
The letter concluded that “It would be a said irony indeed if the signature legislative accomplishment of an Administration committed to reducing income inequality cut living standards for middle income and low wage workers.”
A recent Gallup suggests that 51 percent of Americans disapprove of Obamacare. According to a Fox News poll, 59 percent oppose the healthcare law.
In writing about Obamacare’s lack of acceptance, Noemie Emery of The Weekly Standard recalled that sweeping legislation like Medicare, Social Security, or the Civil Rights Act were bipartisan measures that enjoyed a popular and political consensus. Obamacare is far different in that it was jammed through Congress (barely) on a straight party-line vote when the Democrats controlled both chambers.
“The Affordable Care Act, on the contrary, was passed with public opinion running strongly against it; it was passed by the minimum number of votes in the House, with no Republicans voting for it; it was passed through the Senate via a loophole, as it could not have passed through normal procedures; and it was so complex, convoluted, and incomprehensible that its contents were a mystery both to the voters and the members who passed it, and remained so until last October, three and a half years after it passed … And saying it passed Congress fair and square only seems truthful if ‘fair and square’ serves to describe a massive defiance of public opinion, startling levels of bribes, threats, and buyoffs, and the use of dubious sleight-of-hand measures to cancel the power of public opinion in the face of inconvenient election results.”
Many lawmakers still don’t understand it:
Regardless of the merits of healthcare reform, when all the “Bigs” — Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Pharma, and Big Insurance — get together in a joint venture, it is difficult to see how an ordinary American consumer comes out ahead.
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