◼ Congress is trying to get Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius – who in any sane government would be “former HHS secretary” by now – to testify about the disastrous ObamaCare rollout. She is reportedly resisting these demands, which again should be grounds for dismissal. In the Obama era, top officials have become entirely too comfortable with refusing to testify, invoking the Fifth Amendment, and committing perjury. - John Hayward/Human Events @Doc_o
...Now, you might be thinking that if ObamaCare can’t rope in enough young suckers, the government will just print up some more funny money to cover the difference, and then in a few months Obama will be telling us how we absolutely must raise taxes and/or the debt ceiling to pay the bills Congress has already incurred, or we’ll be like a deadbeat diner trying to skip out on his supper tab. But that’s not strictly true. It’s not the government that will lose money from a shortage of youthful sheep toddling into the program. It’s insurance companies. They still exist under government control, just as certain countries noted for the authoritarian style of their governments still had private industry in the early decades of the previous century. (Ask your Grandpa how that worked out for them, kids!)
And those insurance companies can’t survive if the agonizingly slow pace of Obama enrollment keeps up. Three weeks in, there are still states reporting zero ObamaCare purchases, while others show only dozens or hundreds. There’s a grimly accurate joke going around the Internet that more people have signed up for a proposed one-way mission to Mars than have signed up for ObamaCare....
Update: The Heritage Foundation makes a convincing case that, based on the current pace of enrollment, ObamaCare could actually cause a net loss of insurance coverage in the individual market… and that’s not even counting the employer-provided insurance plans that have been dropped because of the Affordable Care Act and its mandates. That’s a pretty steep death spiral.
◼ The Tea Party’s coming vindication - Jeffrey T. Kuhner/Washington Times
The conventional wisdom is wrong. The mainstream media — and their parrots in the Republican establishment — are claiming that President Obama decisively won the government shutdown battle. In fact, the narrative being peddled is that the GOP brand has been badly damaged, paving the way for a possible Democratic Party takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2014 elections. This is puerile nonsense. Tea Party Republicans, led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, may have lost the battle, but they are poised for a major victory in the larger Obamacare war.
◼ Meltdown Now In Plain Sight - Investor's Business Daily Editorial
