The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded a $1.1 million contract to Families USA to establish a database of Obama "success" stories. Obviously these stories will be used to help President Obama "re-market and rebrand" ObamaCare as he said last week on Fox News.
Question! Who's going to collect all of the ObamaCare "horror" stories? Early indications are that those would far outnumber the "success" stories. But the mainstream media and the Obama Administration do not want you to see or hear about the horror stories, because they would not help the rebranding strategy.
In another rebranding initiative, Hollywood Health & Society, a program with the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, got a $500,000 grant this week from The California Endowment to help TV writers tell better stories about the new health insurance law. In other words, Hollywood writers, don't tell the truth. We will pay you to lie.
Even Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, puts it like this: “People learn from TV. Even if they know it is fiction, even if they know writers can make stuff up, especially in the realm of medicine and public health, if a doctor says something to a patient, people tend to think that someone has checked that, that it’s true.”
When you add these propaganda initiatives to others that are showing up as commercials during football games and other events, the president and his Democrat colleagues in Congress have no intention of reversing this titanic-sized destruction of our health care and health cost systems.
The president and the Democrats did not need to blow up the building to fix a leak in the roof. But they did. So now we have only a few options to try to survive this fiasco, and they are all bad:
1. If you are one of the more than five million people who have already received cancellation notices of your existing health insurance plan, you can a) buy the ObamaCare-approved plan they can offer you at a much higher price, or b) look for a plan on the dysfunctional healthcare.gov website. Good luck!
2. If you have health insurance through your employer where the employer pays a big share of the cost and you pay a small portion, that will all change in 2014, only because the imperial administration granted a one-year delay of the employer mandate. But next year all costs will increase and you can a) suck it up and pay it, or b) look for a better deal somewhere else. Save yourself some time. The better deal does not exist. The people wrote ObamaCare saw to that.
3. If your employer stops offering employee plans because they can't afford the ObamaCare minimum package of "everything for everybody," then your options are the same as in number 1.
4. If you choose to not buy health insurance because you can't afford it, then you can a) apply for Medicaid coverage and hope you are poor enough to qualify, or b) pay the first year fine of $95 or 1 percent of your income – whichever is more – and take your chances that c) you will not get sick and need a doctor or hospital; or d) you can survive a crowded emergency room experience before you, well, die.
5. If you are on Medicare or Medicaid and your doctor can no longer see you because their medical practice can't survive on what the government thinks they are worth, then you can a) try to find another "in-short-supply" doctor accepting more Medicare and Medicaid patients much further from your home or b) keep looking. You can thank Obama and the Democrats for your endless search because no Republicans voted for the Affordable (sic) Care Act.
You see, the dysfunctional "not-soon-to-be-fixed" healthcare.gov website is not the biggest threat to our health care and health insurance needs. The biggest threat is the law itself. It is designed to redistribute the costs of health insurance from richer to poorer, younger to older, healthier to sicker, and men to women.
The problem with this scam is that people are rebelling against paying for the coverage of things they do not need or want. And that they are angry that they cannot afford the higher costs and deductibles, their choices of doctors and hospitals are being limited, and the quality of health care will decrease.
The president's sales pitch has moved from "if you like what you have you can keep it", which we now know is blatantly false, to the scare tactic of "people should not go bankrupt if they get sick." That's true and some do, but not millions. Now, millions may go bankrupt or go without health insurance because they can't afford it.
That's just one more bad ObamaCare option.
