The faces of healthcare: a glimpse of what the Teaparty hates

Beth was born premature.  “I could go on, and on but I will leave you with this; because of the Healthcare Reform Act, our daughter is excelling”

Almost like a modern Lourdes, the sick and desperate are finding salvation and speaking up about it today. But there’s no miracle involved, this virtual march for life is driven by medical science, delivered via the Internet, and made possible by Obamacare. Science and effective public policy can go a long, long ways together.

Below are a few of those stories. They speak for themselves, but it’s just stunning, downright evil I would argue, when a political party in America would feel such hatred for this down into their rotten core, that they happily shutdown the nation as a sort of collective punishment to We the People for electing someone they don’t like. [Read more…]

Morning Star Ministries calls for military takeover

Remember during the Bush years when merely criticizing a government policy, like invading Iraq or the Katrina responses, was high treason? Rick Joyner apparently does not, nor is he worried his cult will glom onto it.

The funny thing is, much of what he says is true in a sense: as in one small hyper-conservative faction in the GOP, Teaparty Republicans, are behaving unconstitutionally and screwing up the nation mightily. But in Joyner’s addled mind, it’s the Teaparty minority that needs to be installed by military coup. Maybe it has something to do with three million people visiting a certain site … What would Jesus do?

2.8 million people have visited http://HealthCare.gov today and we’ve received 81k calls! We’re excited so many people want to #GetCovered — @AccessHealthCT

Links & info for all state healthcare exchanges

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Click image above or this link for an excellent interactive bitmap showing state-by-state status
Below is a linkfest of every state’s HIX and some info about that state’s progress. Some sites are crashing, others are up. If the state name is hyperlinked you can click it for specific info on that state’s progress in creating an exchange. For those states without an HIX, I’ve linked the specific Healthcare.gov page for that state. Healthcare.gov has also been staggering under the traffic demands. [Read more…]

Healthcare sites are BOOMING

Yosemite Valley is quiet, NOAA is down, NASA is furloughed and it reaches all the way to Mars, where Curiosity has been put in indefinite sleep mode, and WW II vets have had to bust down the barriers to enter a memorial, all thanks to the Republican shutdown. But the healthcare sites are open for business and BOOMING. We knew it would be big, but I’m told it’s huge. Here’s a few numbers I’ve seen bouncing around. The New York HIX, called the NYStateofHealth, has logged well over two million hits in the first few hours. Similar numbers are expected for large states like California which just opened their HIX, Covered California, a few mins ago.

Word is the main site, Healthcare.gov, has now recorded more than one million unique IP hits and that was an hour ago when it was lagging and serving up a DOS splash screen. To put that in perspective, it’s more people on that one site than have ever been on Medicare.gov all at once since the site opened.

This is obviously a giant failure of the free market …

Latest poll shows little support for shutdown over Obamacare

They’ve been warned by those who came before them, but fervent belief in a miracle outweighed common sense as the Teaparty managed to talk itself into thinking a shutdown over Obamacare would have wide support and punish the WH. Why wouldn’t they believe that? They believe Obama is responsible for everything bad and a lot of other “bad” stuff they just made up, and they think everyone agrees with them. The latest poll shows that that belief is slated for painful destruction in the reality-based wood chipper: [Read more…]

We are shutdown

Closingtime

The US is shut down today for the first time in almost 20 years. And we’re shutdown today for the same reason we were shutdown back then: the struggle for power between We the People and a few super rich greed-crazed pigs. Progressives represent the first caucus, conservatives stand in, like always, for the pigs. It’s a natural fit, conservatives fan a deep-seated hatred of government, when they’re not in the WH and/or running it into the ground.

Like it or not, Obamacare is up and running!

I’m not sure what those conservatives were thinking, but judging by some of my conservative friends, they’ve been led to believe we would actually toss away Healthcare in trade for a six-week extension in government discretionary spending. It’s strange, but that’s the con that’s been run on the Teaparty grassroots. Conservatives in the House are now scrambling to figure out how they can get the nation running again without it being too obvious they were lying and fleecing their base the whole time: [Read more…]

Healthcare-dot-gov is alive & I have secret sources!

 

Let the zombie apocalypse begin: October 1, 2014, and the creature is stirring to life! I was able to go to Healthcare-dot-gov, and even though the site is not technically at full function until 8 AM EDT and has been getting hammered since midnight, I was able to create screen names and passwords. I was even able to sign in briefly and begin the enrollment process on one state’s exchange. I set up several emails to check various domains, AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail. Sadly, no zombie government agents showed up at my front door, I have yet to receive a summons to serve on a liberal death panel and decide the fate of comatose grandma. No doubt it’s lost in the mail, that stupid gubmit can’t do anything right! But here’s some prelim info and results below. [Read more…]

Bizarre twist in government shutdown debacle

 

Commensurate with the season, there are tricks and sometimes treats in obscure DC politics. As of a few minutes ago the US is technically shutdown, exactly like the Teaparty wing of the GOP intended and promised. But the latest political move in that saga by John Beohner is so strange it makes one worry the Speaker of the people’s House is suffering from something more serious than an embedded, intractable faction. And I don’t mean that in the usual funny way at the Speaker’s expense, it’s so irrational its almost cause for worry as far as Boehner’s state of mental health. It’s a little hard to explain why this so insider sad/funny if you don’t follow arcane procedures. The gist of it is he has requested the CR go to a conference. That has some people scratching their heads and that’s saying it nicely.

A crappy analogy might be a football coach being being interviewed on live TV and suddenly blurting out he demands the NFL draft commence in the third quarter of the ongoing football game. The announcers, officials, and fans on both sides would be a little confused and, probably, a little horrified. They would sure feel, shall we say, totally uncomfortable? As in imagine you were taking your family and your new date out to eat for the first time together, and that person happened to get blacked-out drunk and then publicly crap and piss their pants in the middle of dinner?

It’s just so strange, no one knows how to respond outside of giggling uncomfortably at Boehner. It took about five minutes for the main laughing jags and after-spasms to back off before I could calm down and write this [Read more…]

Shutdown translating into big bucks for both parties

It’s the dollars, always the fucking dollars. Everyone here knows that Ted Cruz and his pals are raising a ton of cash on the shutdown delusion. That’s part of the reason his own cronies are angry; Cruz is wringing every lst drop out of the RushBo swamp and cutting down more than his share of the low hanging fruit by many anonymous GOP accounts. The scam is a simple one: by pretending they can stop Obamacare, the dollars are rolling into to Teaparty coffers (Something similar is happening on the progressive side). That’s why you keep hearing over the top rhetoric about it being the ‘worst law since slavery’ and so on. That’s what brings in the rubes and their small dollar donations.

I don’t know if the GOP is really all that afraid it will succeed, they live in a delusional world, but a few do seem to be aware that some of the endless dire-warning lies will be exposed. Maybe there’s relief ahead for all of us, today is a special day: Sep 30 is end of quarterly fundraising, so the intensity may diminish a bit starting this week: [Read more…]

Conservatives will bear the blame for government shutdown

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According to this CNN poll conducted over the weekend, 46% say they would blame congressional Republicans for a government shutdown, with 36% saying the president would be more responsible and 13% pointing fingers at both the GOP in Congress and Obama. That 36% who blame the President is bolstered by about 20% of the nation who would blame him for anything. We’re going to get to test this data, because we’re heading for a government shut down in a few hours and nothing seems to able to stop it.

At issue is healthcare for millions of people, something conservatives have always been against. Whether it was Medicare or CHIP or Obamacare, they hate the idea of poor and middle-class people seeing doctors and being treated. It’s bizarre but that’s the ground they’ve staked out: [Read more…]