Tuesday’s polling results from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute reflect America’s increasing unhappiness with ObamaCare: its rollout, the president’s dissembling, the delays at Healthcare.gov, and so on. And that unhappiness is consistent across all ages of voters, and includes American women. As Tim Malloy, Quinnipiac’s assistant director, explained:
Like all new presidents, President Barack Obama had a honeymoon with American voters, with approval ratings in the high 50s. As the marriage wore on, he kept his job approval scores in the respectable, though not overwhelming, 40s.
Today, for the first time, it appears that the 40 percent floor is cracking.
Any Democrat with an 11-point approval deficit among women is in trouble. And any elected official with an 8-point trust deficit is in serious trouble.
Once the dust has settled, and the kinks have been worked out, most Americans are persuaded that their healthcare will not improve but will instead get worse. Nearly half of them think Obama lied when he promised that they would be able to keep their present insurance plan. And a consistent majority, according to Quinnipiac, still opposes ObamaCare in its entirety.
The website delays have become legendary, and now it appears that promises that it will be fully functional and operational by the end of the month will also be broken, according to a White House official who wants to keep his job by remaining anonymous. At the moment, the website fails when more than 20-30,000 people attempt to access it at any given time, which is half of its intended capacity. And the primary contractor who built the site has only been able to fix half of the site’s errors so far, with just over two weeks to go.
Insurance companies are stuck, too, as they are unable to complete enrollments for those applying for coverage directly since they can’t access the federal database to determine if any credits or offsets apply.
Those stymied by the failure at the website who try to enroll with the help of “navigators” will also find trouble: They might be lied to, or told to lie, in order to determine their proper credit offsets. Jason O’Keefe, the “guerrilla videotaper” who garnered infamy by taping antics at ACORN and critical comments by NPR’s president that got him fired, pulled another inside job in the office of navigators in Texas.
His video of navigators “helping” an applicant complete his enrollment is, as John Fund noted at National Review, “a familiar sight to viewers of his past efforts exposing Medicaid and voter fraud.” Those navigators are clearly shown advising the applicant to break the law in order to qualify for larger credits and avoid IRS audits. In one galling scene, a navigator advises O’Keefe’s investigator, posing as an ObamaCare applicant who said that he is a smoker, to lie because smokers’ premiums can be up to 50 percent higher than nonsmokers under ObamaCare: “You lie because [if you don’t] your premiums will be higher.”
In another clip the investigator told the navigator that he had a side business that generated income that he didn’t report to the IRS. Said the navigator: “Don’t get yourself in trouble by declaring it now!”
Sold to unsuspecting applicants as being highly trained professionals and able to handle all questions pertaining to ObamaCare, instead, according to Michael Astrue, a former commissioner of Social Security:
these navigators are unaccountable, and yet they will be asking people for Social Security numbers and other sensitive information.
It will not take long for navigators to become predators.
Even if everything worked smoothly from the start, ObamaCare is still an unwieldy, expensive, privacy-invading, rights-obliterating, unconstitutional disaster. Americans who initially believed that ObamaCare was the answer to every healthcare woe are now discovering the reality, and their opinions of Obama and of his pet legislative achievement, continue to decline.
A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
