Tag Archives: Daniel Pfeiffer

Why ObamaCare Will Not Work For Everyone

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President Obama sold ObamaCare as a program that would provide healthcare for everyone who needed it, improve healthcare and lower cost for those who already had insurance, and generally do wonderful things for the American healthcare system. The Wall Street Journal posted an article yesterday explaining why ObamaCare is potentially a death sentence for Edie Littlefield Sundby. On Monday I posted an article about Ms. Sundby (rightwinggranny.com). Ms. Sundby has been fighting stage-4 gallbladder cancer for seven years. Stage-4 gallbladder cancer has a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. She has survived with the help of good doctors and good health insurance. Under ObamaCare she can no longer keep that insurance or all of her doctors.

Yesterday’s article in the Wall Street Journal explained:

Dan Pfeiffer, President Obama’s chief political spinner, sent out a now infamous tweet on Monday linking to a left-wing website that blamed Mrs. Sundby’s policy loss on UnitedHealthcare. The White House default is always to blame the insurers. But UnitedHealthcare only fled the state because ObamaCare’s subsidized exchanges are meant to steal their customers. As more people are pulled into government coverage, policies like Mrs. Sundby’s are harder to sustain economically, so insurers bail.

…As it imposes these policy cancellations, ObamaCare is also systematically destroying one of the best features of the current individual market, known as “guaranteed renewability at class-average rates.” This meant that once an insurance policy was issued, people could renew their coverage year after year at the same rates as their peer group. So someone like Mrs. Sundby who got sick would not pay higher premiums than average and her insurer could not deny coverage—unless UnitedHealthcare quit the business. This guaranteed renewability is no longer a guarantee thanks to ObamaCare.

…The reason Edie Sundby had to lose her plan is because her needs, and her measure of her own well-being, are different from Mr. Obama’s, and that is now unacceptable.

Healthcare should be a decision made between people and their doctors. The government has no place dictating medical care. If the government wants to provide health insurance and healthcare to Americans without health insurance, it should do that with tax credits–not in a way that disrupts those Americans who already have insurance and doctors they like. We also need to remember that being a profitable company is not a sin–profitable companies employ people and help the economy.

 

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I’d Be More Inclined To Listen If You Practiced What You Preach

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From The New York Times January 12, 2011:

It was one of the more powerful addresses that Mr. Obama has delivered as president, harnessing the emotion generated by the shock and loss from Saturday’s shootings to urge Americans “to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully” and to “remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” he said, “it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”

…“If, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse,” Mr. Obama said, “let us remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”

From the Washington Times yesterday:

Senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Thursday compared Republican lawmakers to suicide bombers as the showdown over a possible government shutdown intensified.

“We are for cutting spending, we are for reforming our tax code, we are for reforming entitlements,” Mr. Pfeiffer told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “But what we are not for is negotiating with people who have a bomb strapped to their chest.”

Mr. Pfeiffer, 37, who was hospitalized twice this month for stroke-like symptoms, also compared the GOP to arsonists and kidnappers. He called Republicans’ bid to attach other priorities to a debt-ceiling bill “ransom demands.”

‘Nuff said.

 

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