Health Care

Can you tell that "Bulgarian," "Sunbeam," and "Vladivostok" are different words?  Congratulations: you're smarter than the Obamacare website!  Just for fun, I tried to create an Obamacare account at Healthcare.gov this morning.  At 6:48 AM CDT, I had no trouble getting in. Things were going swimmingly . . . until it came time to choose security questions and provide answers.   As you'll see…

While a great deal of attention has deservedly been given to Kathleen Sebelius's refusal to directly answer comedian Jon Stewart's question about why Obamacare's individual mandate was not been deferred until 2015 like the employer mandate was, at least one of her other comments about the wonders of the government-controlled "marketplace" has been ignored, and shouldn't be. Her supposedly…

In case you haven’t noticed, the government shutdown is all the GOP’s fault.  Today’s Chicago Tribune wanted to make sure readers knew that with a front-page headline titled “Hard-right bloc sticks to its guns: Shutdown stalemate continues as lawmakers in safe seats hold sway.” The article reports that some House Republicans “have chosen to defy Washington’s traditional norms of conversation and…

During the Friday episode of National Public Radio's Morning Edition, co-host Renee Montagne stated that the past several days had been “a charged week at the Capitol,” which led fellow co-host David Greene to declare: “Still, ObamaCare rolled out as planned.” Millions of people have shopped for insurance on the new marketplaces called exchanges since opening day on Tuesday, they noted.…

Early Friday afternoon, USA Today's Tim Mullaney excused HealthCare.gov's "glitches," confidently predicted that "they'll get fixed" (in about two months!) and pronounced the enterprise "an out-of-the-box success for consumers shopping for health insurance" which will "sell tons of insurance," even though he had to go to a canned calculator found elsewhere to do much of his work. As to "selling…

(UPDATE: Chad Henderson has locked down his Twitter account. His Instagram account remains, for now.) Earlier today, I noted (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) that "Obamacare Poster Boy" Chad Henderson, who was written up in the Washington Post, Huffington Post and several other news outlets, and who at one point was scheduled to appear on a Health and Human Services Department conference call (…

CBS This Morning has a long established history of conducting softball interviews of liberal/Democratic guests, while unleashing on conservative/liberal ones. But on Friday, the morning newscast surprisingly hounded Rep. Nancy Pelosi on the ongoing government shutdown. Obama supporter Gayle King repeatedly pressed Pelosi about "people [who] are just saying...work it out....both sides have to be…

(UPDATE: See Chad's response to Washington Post's Sarah Kliff at the end of this post.) If what Reason's Peter Suderman is reporting is correct — and he certainly appears to have done the kind of digging you would expect conscientious journalists to do — the establishment press's lionization of Chad Henderson the Fantabulous Obamacare Enrollee is about to fall apart. Suderman spoke at length…

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's PoliticsNation, during a discussion of the government shutdown, MSNBC's Krystal Ball characterized congressional Republicans as "tak[ing] the whole government hostage," and "threaten[ing]" the "constitutional balance." After host Al Sharpton fretted over the operation of FEMA and the National Hurricane Center during the government shutdown, Ball responded:

CNN boosted President Obama's message on Thursday by taking his challenge to Republicans and pressuring them to get on board with a bill that would fund ObamaCare. After the President called on House Speaker John Boehner to hold an up-or-down vote on the funding bill, CNN took that talking point and pressured Republicans to accept it. Anchor Suzanne Malveaux hailed it as a "very good point…

On Thursday, MSNBC's Chuck Todd, in the introduction to his "Daily Rundown" program, characterized both the response to the Obama administration's barricading of the World War II Memorial and Harry Reid's response to a question about helping children with cancer by funding the National Institutes for Health ("Why would we want to do that?") as "manufactured outrage." World War II ended in 1945,…

Imagine that Jeff Bezos asked his vice-president for sales IT how many people had purchased products from Amazon the day before, and the veep said he'd get back to him "in a few weeks."  How many nanoseconds do you think that hapless employee would last in his job? But on today's Morning Joe, there  was the Obama admin's David Simas, sporting the lofty title of Deputy Senior Advisor for…

Far left radio host Thom Hartmann has said some really crazy stuff over the years such as that evil right-wing billionaires deliberately provoked the violence in Benghazi, Libya in order to make President Obama look bad. He’s also said that NPR is full of “right-wing bias.” Hartmann’s latest delusion is particularly hilarious. He is quite convinced that congressional Republicans plotted to…

The doctor who was once a candidate to be President Obama's surgeon general called the opening of the ObamaCare exchanges "a pretty historic thing" on CNN Thursday. CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviewed one of ObamaCare's helpers working with customers on Maryland's state exchange. His questions basically amounted to a puff piece on the law. [Video below the break.…