She’s making a list, checking it twice - Now, Democrats and the establishment press have to decide whether there is another viable Democratic candidate or if they really and truly are stuck with the woman who dressed them down on Tuesday. She’s probably right, but with an answer that basically added up to, “Yeah, and what are you going to do about it?” Democrats, at least, may be wondering if there isn’t another way to do this. The thought that Clinton had changed this time around has been replaced with a new understanding that she is more herself than ever. And the idea that she might go away under her own steam was permanently exploded. Only a candidate would hold that event. And when you’re dealing with people who maintain their lists of enemies on spreadsheets so as to forget no grievance, you’d better choose carefully.
“I think there’s a little bit of arrogance that ‘Some of these laws apply to some lower people, but not to me, I’m Hilly Clinton.’ And I think the law nobody should be above the law in our land.” – Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on “The Kelly File” Watch here. -Fox News
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., explains the open letter he and 46 other Republican Senators sent to the government of Iran in a USA Today op-ed: “The critical role of Congress in the adoption of international agreements was clearly laid out by our Founding Fathers in our Constitution. And it's a principle upon which Democrats and Republicans have largely agreed. … The Senate must approve any deal President nObama negotiates with Iran by a two-thirds majority vote. Anything less will not be considered a binding agreement when President nObama’s term expires in two years. This is true of any agreement, but in particular with the nuclear deal President nObama intends to strike with Iran.
It’s been a long, snowy winter for Northeasterners, especially for one Massachusetts couple that no doubt would have liked to have seen spring begun a little sooner. AP reports: “The imprint of a license plate in a snowbank proved to be the undoing of a couple suspected of a series of burglaries in Massachusetts. A Lakeville police officer investigating a home break-in traced the imprint to a pickup truck that matched the description of a vehicle seen at other burglaries. Chief Frank Alvilhiera told The Enterprise of Brockton on Monday that the truck was traced to a Dartmouth hotel. A search of a hotel room uncovered more than 300 stolen items, including jewelry, watches, wallets, laptops and cameras. Alvilhiera estimates the goods are worth at least $10,000. Meanwhile, Robert Beaucaire and Amy Peters face charges including breaking and entering and larceny.” -Fox News
“I think what is going to happen on [Hilly’s] part is this: She has decided that stonewalling works. [President nObama] has shown it works on a lot of stuff. A lot of their scandals have been stonewalled and they go away…Her calculation is, ‘Yes, I will be damaged a bit with the press because of the stonewalling but infinitely less than I would be if anybody, an objective observer were to go through and look at the e-mails.’” – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here. -Fox News
(freedomsback.com) - Tax season is stressful enough. But if you are like countless miserable Americans trapped in the nObamacare 1095-A abyss, it’s hell on stilts on a Segway teetering over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The screw-ups, incompetence and bureaucratic blame avoidance over the health insurance exchange tax forms make the healthcare.gov website fiasco look like a flawless product launch. How do I know? My family inexplicably got ensnared in the 1095-A paperwork pit. It’s a government roach motel: Taxpayers check in, but they can never check out.
In 2013, our private high-deductible PPO from Anthem Blue Cross got canceled because of “changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).” Millions of others like us in the individual market for health insurance — including self-employed people, small-business owners, writers, artists and home-based entrepreneurs — suffered the same fate.
My husband reluctantly contacted Colorado’s state health insurance exchange, “Connect for Health Colorado,” just to see what our options were. Months later, we settled on purchasing a new non-nObamacare plan directly from a different private insurer, Rocky Mountain Health. The provider network is much narrower than the Anthem plan we had before the feds intervened. Our two kids’ dental care is no longer covered, and we’ve had our insurance turned down at an urgent care clinic — something that had never happened before.
Better off? Bullcrap. But wait, it gets worse.
Somewhere along the way, the worker bees at Connect for Health Colorado dragooned us into an nObamacare exchange plan offered by Rocky Mountain Health without our knowledge or consent. (How else has the White House inflated nObamacare enrollment figures? Things that make you go “hmm.”) Last month, we received an IRS 1095-A form, which, much to our shock and chagrin, indicated that we had paid nObamacare premiums every month during 2014.
It took hours of time on the phone and Internet to receive an explanation from Connect for Health Colorado on how exactly this happened. Here was the government’s response, word for incomprehensible word:
“We apologize for the delay in responding to your email. After checking your account we are showing you might have had coverage from October 2014 to June 2014. Please call the number below to speak with a Customer Service Representative if this information is incorrect.”
“Might” have had coverage? From “October 2014 to June 2014″?
The saga continues. We were finally able to un-enroll after being auto-enrolled in the nObamacare plan. Then, after being bounced around by the state government health exchange to various voicemail dead ends and back, with hours of migraine-inducing, on-hold music in between, we were told there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the 1095-A form — which shows payment of premiums we didn’t pay to an nObamacare plan we never enrolled in and didn’t want in the first place!
This is just one little horror story. In Minnesota, thousands are still waiting for 1095-A forms that were supposed to arrive on Jan. 31. In California, at least 800,000 taxpayers received screwed-up 1095-As. As a result, some 50,000 people filed the wrong form. Another 750,000 are being told they’ll get corrected forms this month. Hah. Good luck with that.
The costs in time, money and anxiety to hardworking families dealing with this paperwork perdition are enormous. Unknown numbers of people are still waiting for their forms as the April 15 tax-filing deadline looms. More face the added expense and aggravation of filing amended returns through no fault of their own.
Where’s the rest of the media — most of whom have been insulated from these problems because they get their health insurance through their employers?
At least one other journalist smacked head first into reality. Laura Krantz, a former NPR staffer, is now a Scripps Fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Earlier this month, she found out that Connect for Health Colorado had mysteriously canceled her health and dental insurance. After four days and eight hours in nObamacare Phone Hell (OPH), she learned she had lost her insurance coverage and her tax credit — and had to redo all of her paperwork.
Poor Krantz still believes the ultimate solution is “single payer.” But another liberal who encountered 1095-A hell has seen the light. San Francisco resident and former nObama supporter Melissa Klein exposed her ordeal with Covered California last week. The state exchange botched her 1095-A and then insisted she had never enrolled despite invoices she showed them documenting her premium payments. After hours in OPH, her case remains unresolved, and she can’t file her taxes. How is it, she wondered, that “Amazon can ship something to NYC in an hour,” but the White House and Covered California “can’t create a health care system that functions”?
Klein concluded, better late than never: “I no longer believe that the government should mandate health care. … A great idea is just an idea if you can’t execute. And the government has proved time and time again, it can’t execute.
Feelin’ your pain, sister. Is D.C. listening?
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