Don’t think that CGI was somehow chosen for the project on the merits of its past performance as a website developer. An online registry the company tried to build for an Ontario government health agency was a complete debacle. After three years of blown deadlines, the company was fired. Less than two years later, the Obama administration hired them.40
Toni Townes-Whitley, a Princeton classmate of the First Lady, is a senior vice president at the company that failed miserably to deliver Healthcare.gov. Both Michelle Obama and Townes-Whitley just happen to be members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.
Now, I am not implying in any way that the First Lady benefited. In any case, Michelle’s Princeton classmate is a senior vice president of the company that won the contract to build the Obamacare website, but CGI has denied that Townes-Whitley was involved in any way with the company’s selection as the developer of the Affordable Care Act website, saying, “Ms. Townes-Whitley is not currently and has never been responsible for the CMS contract as a CGI employee.”41
Anyone with any real-world experience in any industry knows that a project as massive and complex as developing a website that will enable tens of millions of people to sign up for health insurance is a difficult job. In fact, though, there are hundreds of such websites created and run by companies in the private sector.
With that in mind, isn’t it curious that Obama gave Canada the Obamacare job with all the talent in our own backyard?
If then-HHS secretary Sebelius had even consulted company officers and software developers from organizations such as Google, Amazon, YouTube, or Facebook, she might have understood how you could actually develop and launch such a project in the allotted time. But even though the contract had been open for competitive bidding, the rules governing those bids were so arcane and difficult to follow that most companies couldn’t even figure out how to submit bids.
The Small Business Association publishes a ten-step process explaining how to secure a federal government contract. Among the things it advises those seeking a contract to do are these:
• Seek out somebody who actually knows what they’re doing to help you navigate the process.
• Utilize others, including consulting firms, to help you understand the rules governing the writing of a bid.
• Use data analysis tools to find the appropriate contracts to bid on.
• Consider partnering with another business, especially those owned by minorities and women.42
What it doesn’t say is that you need to be a political insider even to be considered for a government contract.
It didn’t stop there.
In a case brought by a nonprofit agency in Billings, Montana, Christa Ann McClure, the director of the Colorado health exchange, was indicted on eight counts of alleged fraud, including stealing from her previous employer, the nonprofit group Housing Montana, and paying herself hundreds of thousands of dollars for consulting services for projects she was in charge of. Nevertheless, when she was vetted for the Colorado job, she passed with flying colors. McClure failed to mention those potential charges to her new employer. After she was indicted and faced up to twenty years in prison,43 she reached a plea agreement that called for her to make restitution of $33,000 for misdemeanor theft of public money. Eight felony counts against her were dismissed.44
In California’s Covered California health exchange, people are finding they can’t keep their doctors, and the hospitals they’ve become accustomed to aren’t available to them. The companies providing policies under Covered California have cut down dramatically on the number of doctors and hospitals available to those insured under Obamacare in order to hold down their costs.
It’s happening all over the country, as I’ve told you.
But in California, it’s worse than most. California insurance commissioner Dave Jones stated the obvious: “There are a lot of economic incentives for health insurers to narrow their networks,” he said. “But if they go too far, people won’t have access to care. Network adequacy will be a big issue in 2014.”45
The bigger issue is why such patent corruption and incompetence is allowed to continue.
Cash for Cronies
Do you remember the president’s funding of green-energy companies like Solyndra? Companies that had no prospect for success but would cost taxpayers billions of dollars, cash that somehow found its way into the pockets of the Obama fund-raising bundlers?
Healthcare.gov makes Solyndra look like lunch money.
The stock price of health insurance giant UnitedHealth is predicted to rise 40 percent in the future; it anticipates an increase in profits thanks to the increased insurance premiums users will have to pay under Obamacare. One of the company’s subsidiaries, Quality Software Services Inc. (QSSI), was given large contracts to help with the website rollout. UnitedHealth executive vice president Anthony Welters raised half a million dollars for Obama in 2012.46 Then, after QSSI bungled its part in developing the website, the administration gave them the job to fix their own mistakes. QSSI was chosen to be the general contractor in charge of repairing Healthcare.gov.47
It doesn’t stop there. Technical specialty company Qualcomm specializes in developing products that transfer data securely among wireless health-care devices. Qualcomm expects that “wireless solutions are going to be looked at more prominently” under Obamacare. Let me just say that the company’s former chairman, Irwin Jacobs, raised more than half a million dollars for Obama’s reelection campaign.
As Fox News has reported, Obama bundlers David Friedman (nursing homes and long-term care) and Jay Snyder (investment specialist in health-care and pharmaceutical companies), each of whom raised $500,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign, stand to make millions for their companies, both of which are positioned to benefit, assuming Obamacare survives.48
The president was finally forced by pressure from all sides to hold a press conference where he told another lie to Americans who wanted to keep their current health insurance plans.49
The bad news is that he didn’t say anything that indicated he knew how to fix Obamacare.
When he came out a half hour late on November 15, 2013, instead of talking about the disaster of his signature legislation, the first thing he did was divert attention away from the ACA by talking about the Philippines disaster.
Do you even remember what the “Philippines disaster” was?
When he finally got around to talking about Obamacare, he told Americans he’d decided they can keep their health-care plans for another year. He didn’t say how he was going to make that happen. He didn’t acknowledge that he didn’t have the authority to make it happen. He didn’t bother to explain that it would take the insurance companies months and months to reanalyze what it would do to the rates they need to charge.
More than five million people had had their health insurance canceled by early November 2013. The “insurance cycle”—the amount of time it takes for insurance companies to develop and test the plans they will offer to their customers—is about nine months. Those five million people will not even be able to buy a one-size-fits-all policy that would at least keep them covered, even at a higher cost and with coverage they don’t need.
The issue of cost is finally coming to the fore. Health industry specialists are predicting that as the elections of 2014 get nearer, rate hikes will skyrocket. Kathleen Sebelius, who has since resigned, tried to downplay concerns over the coming rate hikes. Her analysis? In her words, “The increases are far less significant than what they were prior to the Affordable Care Act.” This had those in the know scratching their heads. All they could say is that they—the people who run the insurance industry and who actually know something about health insurance—disagree. One senior insurance executive whose company expects to triple its rates on the Obamacare exchange next year said, “It’s pretty shortsighted because I think everybody knows that the way the exchange has rolled out… is going to lead to higher costs.”50
With his press
conference announcement, Obama created what amounts to an insurance refugee crisis. Five million American health insurance refugees will be faced with potential disaster unless someone steps in to intervene in a way that will change their fate.
Let me give you a short list of some of the things you’ll be losing when you switch to an Obamacare policy.
Obamacare won’t pay for nongeneric drugs. That means that most people with illnesses being treated through the use of new drugs that are not sold as generics simply will not be able to afford treatment. If you suffer from a disease such as lupus or multiple sclerosis, you’ll be dealing with what’s called a “closed drug formulary.” That’s ObamaSpeak for “you’re out of luck.” As Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute explains, “If the medicine that you need isn’t on that list, it’s not covered at all. You have to pay completely out of pocket to get that medicine, and the money you spend doesn’t count against your deductible, and it doesn’t count against your out of pocket limits, so you’re basically on your own.”51
Even if your drug is available generically, Obamacare will drive up the cost of generic drugs dramatically. Obamacare does require that exchange plans cover generic prescription drugs, but the demand may be driven up so much that the price of generic prescriptions could skyrocket. It’s already happening. The prices of the generic cholesterol drug Pravastatin and the antibiotic Doxycycline have already spiked by nearly 1,000 percent in the months following the Obamacare rollout. More than three-quarters of pharmacists surveyed said they’ve seen the prices of two dozen or more generic drugs go higher. How many pharmacies will go out of business when people can’t even afford generic drugs?52
There’s still a lot that we don’t know about Obamacare. Significant sections of the bill are still subject to regulatory action, and there’s no way to predict what effect that might have on the consequences of this monstrosity. And there are still plenty of other consequences we haven’t felt because the administration can’t get core parts of the bill—like how people can pay their premiums—operative.
Big businesses still have no idea what the employer mandate might entail, and insurance companies have no idea what sort of benefits this behemoth is going to require them to provide in the future. There are still dozens of rules that are scheduled to be made public within the next year or so, some of which were expected by the middle of 2013 but have not yet been formulated and released. They include everything from nondiscrimination standards to the Obamacare requirement that restaurants and food vendors put calorie counts on their menus and vending machines. Obama is not about to let individual citizens manage their own food intake without its attempting to influence their choices based on information that has already proven not to influence the food choices of overweight Americans despite the fact that it has been provided on virtually all other food packaging.
On April Fools’ Day, the president took to the podium and announced that—miracle of miracles—Obamacare had signed up 7.1 million subscribers. Coincidentally, this was a hundred thousand more than were needed to make the rollout a “success.”
In other words, Obama was trying to get everyone to believe that more than seven million people had managed to navigate the faulty website, get through the Healthcare.gov maze without having their identity stolen, and decipher the rules that change all the time. And now they think they’ve got health insurance. The problem is, they haven’t paid for it yet. The back end of the website still can’t accept their credit card information.
Facing the risk of rising insurance rates in the months before the 2014 midterm elections, the Obama administration essentially offered a bribe to insurance companies to keep their rates low for the next several years. Hidden in hundreds of pages’ worth of new regulations issued in late May 2014 was a provision that pledged to bail out health insurance companies by compensating them with taxpayer money if they will keep rates low. It’s another crooked Obama move to hold on to power despite the fact that Americans and U.S. insurance companies face devastating losses of coverage and money thanks to this legislation.53
You’ve probably followed the disturbing Veterans Affairs medical treatment scandal. Our returning and longtime veterans are put on secret waiting lists that are meant to hide the fact that they’re not able to see doctors. The waits they must endure before they receive treatment often are a year or longer. Hundreds of veterans have died because they were unable to see a VA doctor. What’s happening with the VA typifies what is going to happen with all medical care in the United States: Those who are ill and need treatment will be shuttled to the back of the line to endure long waits before they receive treatment. The fact that in the VA case it’s those who have sacrificed their health fighting for our freedom makes this ineptitude only more egregious.
The White House isn’t releasing any genuine data, because there isn’t any. Sebelius has resigned, and the administration has hired another incompetent who can mismanage what’s left of Obamacare. All they can provide is a made-up number to tell the public how many people are covered to try and make it sound like they know what they’re talking about. We’re starting to understand they have no idea what’s going on.
CHAPTER 7
The War on Civil Rights
During the Civil War, Lincoln rerouted telegraph lines through the War Office to spy on reporters and editors to make sure their stories were sympathetic to his war views. Obama’s FCC has pressured newsrooms to report what this administration wants reported. Those who don’t are taken off the White House A-list—pushed to the back of the reporting bus.
By using the phrase “the war on civil rights” as the title of this chapter, my intent is to show you how serious I find our own government’s depriving us of our civil rights to be. But before we go one sentence further I want to make sure you know what I mean by those words.
If you ask a sophomore in high school to define the term, you’ll usually get an answer that includes names from the liberal Mount Rushmore: Martin Luther King Jr. or the Rev. Jesse Jackson or Bobby Kennedy. Or they’ll bring up the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and how they pertain to slavery. It’s not the high school students’ fault that they have such a narrow view of words that are so encompassing. From the second grade on, they’re limited to a one-sided version of what civil rights means. They’re taught to think that civil rights is about one group, one movement, or one era in American history.
In other words, they’re not getting the complete picture.
By definition, civil rights are political and social freedoms for all citizens and not simply for one group. And it’s these civil rights, the ones to which we’re all entitled by the U.S. Constitution, which are now disappearing.
Among the signs of that is the fact that race-based violence is on the rise in America today. I’m sure you’ve heard of this epidemic. It’s called the Knockout Game, and it mostly involves a defenseless person and a group of aspiring young men, often associated with a gang. Sometimes the incident is captured on video and uploaded to YouTube so the world can see just how inhuman American cities have become. In one of the more notorious of these videos, filmed in Jersey City, New Jersey, you can see a man killed by the sucker punch. Over a million people have watched the video.
While I see the emergence of the Knockout Game as a sign of the racial division that is deepening in our country, that’s not the only reason I recount it here. I tell it to you to bring your attention to a similar assault that recently happened in our most powerful legislative body. I tell it as a prime example of how vulnerable our civil rights are to the gang of leftists who now run this country.
Let me give you a little background.
If you’re old enough, you might remember a movie called Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Its director was Frank Capra, a man who made films so syrupy you could get diabetes just watching them. The simple premise of the movie is this: A naïve freshman U.S. senator introduces a bill that would set aside land for a camp in his home state
to be used by the “Boy Rangers,” Capra’s lightly veiled version of the Boy Scouts. What the freshman senator doesn’t know is that legislation for a graft-funded dam project on the land is already in the works, orchestrated by a crooked senator and unscrupulous businessmen.
To try and stop the legislation, Mr. Smith stages a one-man filibuster, holding the floor of the Senate to delay the vote on the dam project until his voice is raw and he’s near collapse. Of course, Mr. Smith holds on just long enough. As the movie ends, mailbags filled with letters in support of the camp and carried by members of the Boy Rangers are dumped on the Senate floor. The principled politics behind Mr. Smith Goes to Washington not only made Jimmy Stewart a star, it also made a star out of the Senate filibuster, the single most effective defense against the overreach of corrupt power when it comes to presidential appointments.
The Filibuster Fiasco
Frank Capra is dead. So is Jimmy Stewart. And now so is the filibuster.
The filibuster had been around since the late 1700s. Harry “Reid ’Em and Weep” played the Knockout Game, successfully ending the filibuster without even bringing it to a vote.
And the American people are the defenseless victims.
Even Lamar Alexander, who has trouble making sense when he tells you what he had for breakfast, said that Reid’s removal of the filibuster is the “most dangerous and consequential change in the rules since Thomas Jefferson wrote them.”1
The rule that Reid invoked is known as the “nuclear option.” It allows the Senate to approve presidential nominations to the court and executive-level appointments with a simple majority. In March 2013, Rand Paul played the Jimmy Stewart role, filibustering for thirteen hours against the use of drones against Americans on American soil. A month earlier, Ted Cruz filibustered against raising the national debt ceiling.
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 13
