By eliminating the individual health insurance market, the administration is using Obamacare to bring into being a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the poor. Deprived of health care they can’t afford, the middle class will become totally dependent on the federal government for their medical care.
What was needed was a rationale. Enter MIT’s Jonathan Gruber. I can’t believe the level of insanity coming out of once-great universities. Gruber is the genius who said: “Genetic lottery winners should pay more for their health insurance.”20
You understand how twisted this Gruber is, right? Saying that our health-care system is discriminatory, that if you’re healthy you should pay more, and if you’re sick you should pay less.
The problem is that there are any number of reasons you might be sick.
I’ve tried to take good care of myself. I’ve lived a healthy lifestyle. So don’t you think I should pay less for my health care? Shouldn’t people who live right, who don’t take drugs, who don’t have hyper-multiple sexual partners, shouldn’t they be rewarded instead of ObamaScare charging me more so people who haven’t lived healthy lifestyles can pay less?
I say people who indulge in risky behavior should pay more. I don’t want to pay for their behavior.
I engage in the riskiest behavior on earth. I sleep eight hours a night. I eat a clean, healthy diet. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs.
I am a Normo-path.
I don’t sleep with fifty people a week. We’re not allowed to mention that promiscuity spreads sexually transmitted diseases? For instance, one of the consequences of providing contraception is that it can encourage people to engage in risky behavior. So with Obamacare we get to pay for people who get STDs because of their own irresponsible behavior?
There used to be a discount on your health insurance if you didn’t smoke. You paid less for your health insurance if you followed a healthy lifestyle. And if you smoked, they wouldn’t give you insurance, or they’d charge you more. They’d put you in a risk pool. With Obamacare there are no risk pools.
Everybody’s in the risk pool now.
Do you think private insurance companies wanted to lose money on you because you didn’t have any self-control? Only the government is that perverse.
So this guy Gruber from MIT says, You’re the genetic lottery winner because you’re healthy.
I watch my health. I take care of myself. And I should pay for an idiot who’s injecting heroin? I should pay for a guy who smokes? I should pay for a prostitute riddled with disease?
I don’t want to pay for them. That’s how I feel. You pay for your own liver transplant if you drank like a fool. I’m not in favor of people who want the middle class, folks who live with morals, scruples, and integrity, to pay for those who live debauched lives. But that’s where the collective wealth of America’s once great middle class is headed.
Putting Your Private Information at Risk
Every American who is forced to go onto the Healthcare.gov website and enter personal information is immediately handing over their personal data—from their Social Security numbers, to their incomes, to their private health histories—to the enemy. But that’s only what you give them voluntarily. Thanks to the raft of documents released by Edward Snowden, we now know that the NSA can gain access to your computer through such things as Windows error messages and your purchasing of apps. Even the popular Angry Birds app can give the NSA a portal into your privacy.21 So if they can get into your computer and e-mail through apps and error messages, why can’t they get in through a website application that they administer? Think about that.
As a report from the General Accounting Office explains, the information they gather goes to two main destinations. First it’s channeled into the Federal Data Services Hub. The mission of the Data Services Hub is to pull together into one place your personal data from the IRS, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, the VA, the Social Security Administration, Medicaid, the Peace Corps, and any other government agency with which you’ve had even a passing relationship. Once it has the information, it distributes the data “to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer-eligibility information.”22 In other words, your most private and personal information is allowed to leak out into the web, where it’s fair game for any identity thief or political adversary.
Why is this allowed?
The federal government has hired fifty thousand new employees and given them the responsibility for administering this massive data grab. They’re called navigators, and they aren’t vetted during the hiring process or at any other time. No one knows how many petty criminals, sexual deviants, illegal aliens, and tax evaders have been hired as navigators. These potentially rogue, highly partisan federal employees have access to all of your personal information.
One thing we do know: A terrorist from the country of Jordan worked briefly as an Obamacare navigator in Illinois. He got hired because virtually all governments—in this case, the Illinois state government—are incompetent to vet their employees and make sure they’re not subversives or criminals. It turns out that Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, the navigator I’m talking about, had been convicted in Israel for her role in several bombings, including an attack that killed two Hebrew University students. Odeh had hidden a bomb in a candy box she planted on a shelf in one of the stores in the Israeli Shufersol supermarket chain. It wasn’t until after she’d been hired and had worked as a navigator that the Illinois Department of Insurance finally discovered that “she had been convicted in Israel for her role in the bombings of a supermarket and the British Consulate in Jerusalem and failed to reveal the conviction on her application,” as it stated in a disciplinary report.23
James O’Keefe, the activist whose stealth videos helped expose the corrupt practices of ACORN, turned his cameras on several groups of Obama’s navigators. O’Keefe found that the people running Obamacare at the state and national levels are not only incompetent, they’re often corrupt partisans. The supposedly nonpartisan group Enroll America inadvertantly revealed its true nature. When one of its officers, Brian Pendleton, was introduced at a speaking engagement, the person introducing him described the organization as “the official group for the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” The regional director for another group, Battleground Texas, a group which shares data and works directly with Enroll America, describes his organization’s mission as “turning Texas blue.”
One of O’Keefe’s investigators posed as an applicant. When he told the navigator he smoked, he was advised to keep that information to himself. “Lie,” he was told; “if you don’t, your premiums will be higher.” Another of O’Keefe’s journalists told the navigator that he’d lied on his tax return. “Don’t get yourself in trouble by declaring now,” he was told.24
Guess which government agency the navigators report to?
If you guessed the IRS, you win.
The fact that your private information is collected in a central government database means that it provides the perfect opportunity for Obama supporters like Enroll America to use that data to conduct a get-out-the-vote operation for Democratic candidates. One of the results of this? Conservatives may never be able to successfully run for political office, because their personal information will be immediately given to their Democratic opponents so they can smear the opposing candidate. This means that if you oppose a government policy, the IRS can do precisely what Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Unit, did to Tea Party groups.
How does the president respond to the incompetence and corruption that is rampant in state health-care exchanges?
He issues a health-care “fix” by executive order.
Many state-run websites flounder, unable to provide even a reasonable chance to sign up for their residents. In those states, the Democratic governors have faced sharp criticism for their states’ enrollment procedures because they decided to run their own websites. Those governors are the ones who
will benefit from this new order.
In Oregon, the health-care exchange had failed to sign up a single person for health insurance by the end of 2013. The state’s website did not function at all, so it was of no use in enrolling people. The state went to paper applications and hired four hundred new employees to process them. That hasn’t worked very well, either, although Oregon does claim that some twenty-three thousand people had signed up by mid-January 2014. The state has spent more than $165 million of a $300 million budget to get its exchange up and running, to no avail.
Over half of its budget!
A cost of nearly $7,200 per person signing up!
No one has been fired, although two people did resign. There is an ongoing investigation, but as of this writing no charges have been filed.25
Oregon governor John Kitzhaber was ecstatic when he heard that Obama was going to bail him out. He said, “Today’s news means that many more Oregonians will be able to access better coverage at a more affordable cost.”
Here’s what the executive order promises: Residents who can’t sign up because of the incompetence of those running state exchanges can still get federal tax credits even though they bought private insurance policies other than those provided through the exchanges. Under the law, you weren’t eligible for these subsidies unless you purchased from one of the exchanges.26
In other words, as he has done so often, when it’s convenient, the president ignores the law.
Let me get back to the subject of Healthcare.gov’s assault on our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.
I’ve told you about the Obama administration’s penchant for purposeful incompetence. Well, there’s no better example than the Obamacare website.
How vulnerable is Healthcare.gov? Programmers included language in the source code that explains that applicants have “no reasonable expectation of privacy.”27
That’s the equivalent of a bank having the slogan, “Your money’s not safe with us!”
The website is so defenseless that cyberthieves are lining up. One of the ways hackers invade the privacy of website users is to create websites with similar names to the one they’re trying to hack.
By the time Healthcare.gov was rolled out, more than seven hundred cybersquatters had set up websites with names like www.obama-care.us.
Obama-care.us presents itself as part of the “Obamacare enrollment team,” and offers an “Obamacare enrollment form.” The only purpose of the form that I can see is to steal your information. The site had more than three thousand visitors by mid-November 2013. The company that owns Obama-care.us owns nearly two hundred other cybersquatter sites designed to redirect visitors from locations with similar names.
The federal development team didn’t bother to perform even the most rudimentary security checks before the rollout of Healthcare.gov. If they had done what every competent development team does—check whether their website name was already in use—they would have discovered that Healthcare.us had been registered nearly twenty years ago. That website, which has an image of the White House on its home page, was designed to deceive users into thinking it was sanctioned by the federal government.
In Website Building 101 they tell you to purchase domain names that are similar to the one you’re developing to reduce the chance of cybersquatting. In the words of one cybersecurity expert, “I was shocked to find out that they have not picked up any of these other top-level domains.”28
Another security expert was shocked to find that the code, which is used to transfer personal information to third parties, including advertising companies, was unencrypted.29 CNN News hired a computer expert to test the security of the website. Their expert was able to guess at a user name, and then use unencrypted source code to access the password resetting function. After he had changed the user’s password, he was able to display the three answers to the user’s security questions. With this information, he could not only hack into this user’s account on Healthcare.gov, he could also hack into other websites accessed by the user, since many systems use identical security questions.30
Computer security expert David Kennedy, CEO of Trusted Sec, explained that you don’t even need to be an experienced computer user, let alone a hacker, to access records. Using a technique called passive reconnaissance, he was able to recover the personal data of more than seventy thousand people who had enrolled using the Obamacare website. He said that the website was like a car with doors and windows open. “That’s basically what they allow you to do and there’s no real sophistication level here,” he said. It took him less than four minutes to get the data on the seventy thousand, and he could have gotten the private information of hundreds of thousands more if he’d wanted to.31
Another group of hackers known collectively as Anonymous took advantage of a flaw in Adobe Systems software that enabled them to break into thousands of Obamacare records. In doing so, they left back doors in the software that would enable them to return whenever they wanted to.32 U.S. intelligence agencies issued a warning that Healthcare.gov had been infected by malware that had been created by computer experts in the nation of Belarus. They needed help from the Belarus government to remove it.33
Add to that the fact that the back end of Healthcare.gov—the code that actually enables people who enroll in Obamacare to pay their premiums—had not even been built by the end of March, when the open enrollment period for Obamacare ended, and you’ve got a recipe for total disaster. Henry Chao, the same guy who hoped Obamacare wouldn’t be a third-world experience, said the payment software would be operative by mid-January 2014, but that date passed and you still couldn’t pay your premium online.34
Healthcare.gov captures and stores all the important personal data of those who access it, then makes it easily available to other government agencies and hackers who crack the almost nonexistent encryption.
The hackers are nowhere near as corrupt and dangerous as the government agencies that have access to this data. For instance, the government agency that brought you Lois Lerner now has even greater access to your private medical and financial records than you could have ever have thought possible.
It’s my opinion that Healthcare.gov may represent the most massive violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy ever committed in U.S. history.
The ACA: Designed to Eliminate Jobs and Increase Dependency
Even before the official rollout began, Obamacare had already begun to shrink the American middle class because it changed the definition of full-time work from forty to thirty hours a week. Employers everywhere began to reduce their employees’ hours and eliminate many jobs.
The reason government officials gave for redefining full-time downward was so that more employees would be eligible for employer-paid health insurance. But in my opinion the real reason was to further decimate the U.S. economy. Because of the reduction in the number of full-time jobs, longtime middle-class employees saw their hours reduced and jobs eliminated.
The plan is working. It’s moving us rapidly toward the next civil war, as middle-class Americans are being forced into the have-not category by a government dominated by the haves.
A report issued by the Congressional Budget Office, which in my opinion should also be known as the Democratic Party’s mouthpiece, finally began to come clean on Obamacare’s impact on jobs: The Affordable Care Act will cost the U.S. economy 2½ million jobs over the next several years.35 In other words, as millions of people come into the labor market, millions of jobs will disappear thanks to Obamacare alone. It means that the real number, including lost jobs and new job seekers, is easily greater than five million. That’s five million more Americans who will be forced onto the government dole as the administration’s dream of creating a socialist hell right here in America is advanced. If there are any taxpayers left by that time, they’ll be the ones footing the bill for this takeover.
Because Obamacare reduces the definition of full-time work to thirty hours a week, fewer employers will be willing t
o hire full-time employees and pay for their health insurance. A Duke University survey found that nearly half of all major U.S. employers are no longer going to provide health benefits for their employees, forcing them out into the Obamacare wilderness as they search for coverage. Some 40 percent say they’ll reduce hiring new full-time employees for the same reason, adding to the job loss Americans face.36
Another consequence of the job-decimation component of Obamacare is that it encourages employers to consider reducing the number of people they hire. Because of the Affordable Care Act, full-time workers have to be paid an average of $1.79 more an hour. Companies in New York and New Jersey, where health-care plans are more expensive, are especially hard hit by this increase. The businesses that suffer the most? It’s not the big law firms, banks, and manufacturers—the few of them that are left in the United States—it’s small business such as restaurants, shops, and mom-and-pop stores where employees’ wages eat up much of the operating budgets. The owner of one dog-grooming business in New York State says that Obamacare doubles his insurance cost per employee. Owners of small businesses—and these businesses taken together employ more than 30 million workers across the country—will face paying twice the current rate to insure their employees.37
How many times do I have to tell you how dangerous this administration has become? How many of their disastrous policies will it take before we say “enough”?
Operation Incompetence
You didn’t have to be a detective to know that there was something suspicious about the Obamacare website from day one. Only four companies were even considered for the job of creating Healthcare.gov. By the time the rollout began, the total amount of compensation for the work awarded to the developer was over half a billion dollars.
The company chosen to take advantage of what amounts to a government handout, considering the abject failure of the launch, was the Canadian vendor Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique38 (CGI; English translation: Information Systems and Management Consultants). CGI was one of the sixteen companies being considered, and while three other companies were invited to bid, I’ve been unable to find a good explanation of how and why the Canadian company was chosen for the massive project.39
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 12
