There’s a reason why the Obama administration is keeping the new rates for Obamacare hidden until after the election…

(IBD) ObamaCare shoppers in search of the lowest-cost plan may come down with a mild case of rate shock when 2015 exchange enrollment begins next month.
An examination of next year’s rates in the biggest city in 15 states and Washington, D.C., reveals that the cost of the cheapest bronze plan will jump an average of 13.9% for 40-year-old non-smokers earning 225% of the poverty level ($26,260).
In Seattle, the cost of the cheapest bronze plan, after subsidies, will soar 64%, from $60 to $98 per month, for individuals at this income level. Some other cities seeing notable gains include Providence (up 38%, from $72 to $99 per month); Los Angeles (up 27%, from $88 to $111); Las Vegas (up 22%, from $100 to $122); and New York (up 18%, from $97 to $114).
The surge in the cost of the cheapest subsidized bronze policy could negatively impact enrollment in 2015. This year, 39% of bronze plan choosers picked the lowest-price option. One might expect that share to rise in 2015, when millions of people who passed on ObamaCare exchanges this year are expected to enroll. (more…)

The guy behind the Death Panels structurally created in Obamacare policy reveals his personal preference for life expectancy. It helps to understand the thought process behind the policy.

(Via The Atlantic) Seventy-five.
That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.
This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.
I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value. (more…)

Against the backdrop of 3,500 cases – 1552 dead, and another U.S. doctor diagnosed with the virus, the Director of The CDC delivers a stark warning…

ATLANTA (CBS Atlanta/AP) — The director for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says that the Ebola outbreak is going to get worse.

Speaking to “CBS This Morning” following his trip to the West African countries dealing with the outbreak, Dr. Tom Frieden explained that they have to act now to try to get Ebola under control.
“It is the world’s first Ebola epidemic and it is spiraling out of control. It’s bad now and it’s going to get worse in the very near future,” Frieden told CBS News. “There is still a window of opportunity to tamp it down, but that window is closing. We really have to act now.”
Frieden, who visited Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, will tell Washington tomorrow that the Ebola outbreak is “spiraling upward.” The CDC director explained that these countries still need help to deal with the deadly outbreak. (more…)

(Sharyl Attkisson) An email obtained by Congress shows the top official for Healthcare.gov at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Department of Health and Human Services, Marilyn Tavenner, instructed the agency’s top spokesman to “Please delete this email.”

The instruction appears significant for several reasons: First, the email to be deleted included an exchange between key White House officials and CMS  officials. Second, the email was dated October 5, 2013, five days into the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov. Third, federal law requires federal officials to retain copies of –not delete– email exchanges. And fourth, the document to be deleted is covered under Congressional subpoena as well as longstanding Freedom of Information requests made by members of the media (including me). (more…)

The latest revelations in the ObamaCare debacle revolve around Obama architect Jonathan Gruber.  On at least seven occasions, Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber indicated states had to set up exchanges or subsidies would stop flowing, threatening the law’s effective existence.
This is a position Gruber himself now ridicules, and insists nobody actually intended for states to have to set up the exchanges to get access and subsequent subsidy.   But he has spoken about it so extensively the video’s are, well, devastating.

When your own stick turns out to be a boomerang, or what happens when you step on your own rake !

The latest revelations in the ObamaCare debacle revolve around Obama architect Jonathan Gruber.
You might remember back in 2010 during the fight over ObamaCare mandates ‘we the people’ were told the mandate was a penalty and not a tax.   However, when ObamaCare challenges ultimately reached the courtroom the administration argument was exactly the opposite.  The government argued the mandate was a tax not a penalty; only as a tax could the construct survive legal scrutiny.   This latest Gruber development similarly pretzellian but infinite degrees worse.
The construct of ObamaCare execution relied upon a network of state exchanges to enroll people in the plans.   The problem for the administration was the volume of political opposition to the entire plan itself.   Consequently the Obama administration had to set up a “stick” or punitive punishment if any state failed to comply with setting up the exchange.
The stick they settled upon was a simple premise – financial blackmail.   Any state who did not construct an exchange for their state citizens to enroll in ObamaCare would face a punishment of not being allowed to receive a federal subsidy for their premium.     In essence the goal was to force states to set up exchanges.  To force compliance the carrot was the federal premium subsidy, the stick was financial punishment if they didn’t. (more…)

WASHINGTON –  A federal appeals court dealt a major blow to ObamaCare on Tuesday, ruling against the legality of some subsidies issued to people through the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
The ruling is likely to be appealed. And a separate federal appeals court — the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals — hours later issued its own ruling on a similar case that upheld the subsidies in their entirety.
But the decision Tuesday morning by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia nevertheless strikes at the foundation of the law by challenging subsidies that millions of people obtained through the federally run exchange known as HealthCare.gov.
The panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2-1 that the IRS went too far in extending subsidies to those who buy insurance through that website.
(more…)

If your children are old enough to be in college, they probably think the country they were born into is falling apart.  If you’re a Baby Boomer like myself, you know the country you were born into is already gone.  It’s a hard thing to thwart the general feeling of optimism shared by most Americans during a beautiful summer season.  But, if you stop and take a thoughtful assessment of the disasters currently befalling our world, perhaps you’ll see that the fall might be closer than you think.

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The summer of 2014 will go down in history as the season when America fell apart. Let’s take a tour of the disasters…

(Townhall)…Germany in 2008 enthusiastically hosted candidate Barack Obama for his so-called “Victory Column” speech. Now, Germans suddenly sound as if they are near-enemies of the U.S. Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly was furious that her cell phone was tapped by American intelligence agents. She just kicked the top CIA official out of Germany, further enraged that the U.S. had recruited at least one German official to provide intelligence on the German government. Polls show that Germans find Vladimir Putin’s Russian tyranny almost as popular as Barack Obama’s America.
Japan is becoming similarly frustrated with the U.S. It is rearming like crazy to confront an aggressive China. Both Asian powers apparently assume that Obama won’t guarantee the security of the Japanese as America had in the past. (more…)