Health Care

Gee, Ed, do you think that the world's worst rollout and the looming actuarial disaster could have anything to do with it? On his MSNBC show today, Ed Schultz seemed shocked that Dems in DC he recently spoke with were reluctant to run on Obamacare. In a moment of comical candor, Schultz admitted: "if you're doing statistics, you're not going to win that battle." Translation: well, yeah,…

On Tuesday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo and Elizabeth Cohen applauded the 2.2 million reported enrollments in ObamaCare as "good," but also lamented that only 25 percent of the sign-ups are young adults. The Obama administration had hoped that 40 percent of the enrollees would fall in the 18 to 34-year-old age group. Cuomo and Cohen pointed the finger entirely at insurance companies for this…

In perhaps the most nauseating way to put a positive light on the poor ObamaCare enrollment numbers, Time’s Kate Pickert claimed that a “huge surge in Obamacare enrollment” occurred at the close of last year. In what could have been described as an Obama press release, the Time “Swampland” blog spun so hard for the president’s health care law, Press Secretary Jay Carney couldn't do any better…

Let's see. We know, to name just a few of many impositions, that much of the enrollee information that HealthCare.gov and other exchanges have communicated to insurers has been erroneous, that insurers have had to deal with signing up hundreds of thousands of policyholders they originally cancelled, that deadlines for premium payments have been serially revised, and that there is no…

  The journalists at CBS This Morning on Tuesday hyperventilated over the latest "fashion milestone" for Michelle Obama, donating four minutes to the First Lady's second inaugural dress appearing at the Smithsonian. In contrast, the latest setback for ObamaCare warranted only a minute and 19 seconds. Co-host Charlie Rose enthused, "First Lady Michelle Obama is marking another fashion…

The Obama administration today revealed that more than half of the sign-ups for ObamaCare are aged 45 and older, hardly the sort of young, healthy insurance pool the White House was hoping for. On their websites, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times all focused on the older/sicker skew of the Healthcare.gov signups. The Washington Post, however, tried to accentuate the…

Some important ObamaCare news broke late on Friday when the Obama administration announced it was dropping CGI, the contractor that built the inept healthcare.gov website, and replacing it with technology consulting firm Accenture. On top of that, on Friday, the Republican-led House passed a bill -- with a substantial number of Democrats joining in -- to partially address security concerns…

Following up on Friday's awful jobs report from the government (only 74,000 seasonally adjusted jobs added, with the unemployment rate dropping to 6.7 percent only because adults continued to leave the workforce), the Asssociated Press's Christopher Rugaber tried to search for excuses. To its credit, the headline at Rugaber's report didn't blatantly dissemble like the one at Bloomberg, which…

Emmy Rossum, the 27-year-old star of Showtime’s Shameless, which has its fourth season debut tonight (Jan 12), on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live marveled at the “amazing” and “free health care” in Britain. Recounting her travails during a recent visit to the nation with nationalized healthcare, she told Kimmel that food poisoning sent her to a hospital. “The hospitals are amazing there,” she…

Bullying by staffers of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has denied knowledge of their actions when they were taken, is a national news obsession. Bullying by staffers of Colorado Senator Mark Udall — which the Senator has acknowledged and is defending — is barely a blip. The story, first reported in the Colorado blogosphere at Complete Colorado, is that Udall staffers "worked…

MSNBC contributor Irin Carmon continued her obsession with abortion on Thursday, penning an article for MSNBC.com titled “Why the GOP Is Still Talking About Abortion.” Carmon mocked Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and RNC chairman Reince Priebus for holding up the protection of innocent life as a core principle of the Republican Party. Yes, the party which got its start advocating the sanctity…

"Obama approval ratings turn around," exulted the msnbc.com landing page headline for Traci G. Lee's January 9 story, "Positive start to 2014 for Obama: poll." Lee set about spinning the results of the latest Quinnipiac Poll, which shows President Obama sitting atop a 41 percent approval rating, up from a low of 38 percent in December, but still a net negative approval rating. Lee used the…

I kept looking for any sign that Ta-Nehisi Coates, described as "a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues," was kidding in his Monday afternoon column about Melissa Harris-Perry when he called her "The Smartest Nerd in the Room." He wasn't. When last seen here at NewsBusters, Coates was pretending that the wealth gap between blacks and whites…

Los Angeles Times columnists have produced several delusional doozies in the past few days. One of the more hysterical came from Doyle McManus on Sunday ("The president's hump year; The sixth year is often tough, but Obama could triumph"). While acknowledging that "The public's initial romance with the president has faded" and that "events are in charge now," he backhandedly described Obama's…