Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon says as many as 90,000 Louisianians could lose their health insurance coverage because of ObamaCare.
That’s 90,000 Louisianians in addition to millions of Americans across the country who are in the midst of receiving notices from their health insurance carriers stating their policies will be cancelled in the near future. The policies will be cancelled because they don’t comply with the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare. Certainly President Obama himself didn’t believe his signature legislative achievement would negatively disrupt so many lives for the sake of rolling out the federal government’s latest scheme to control every as aspect of the U.S. economy.
Truth be known, he knew it all along, but he’ll never acknowledge it because this president refuses to accept responsibility for any action taken by his administration that the national media doesn’t deem a success from the get-go. It was bad enough that the web site the government unveiled for individuals to visit to sign up for ObamaCare failed to meet expectations.
In fact, it failed miserably and isn’t expected to be fully operational until the end of November. Don’t hold your breath. And don’t expect Obama to acknowledge he was aware of the problems with the web site days prior to it launch on Oct. 1, which he was.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a new government program as enormous as ObamaCare would encounter a problem or two in its infancy. One would think, though, that $600 million would be a sufficient sum of money to develop a web site to manage it.
I suppose Team Obama should have reached out to a company other than one with ties to the president’s wife to handle a job as important as developing a web site that supposedly will eventually serve some 30 million Americans. Maybe not. Or maybe I’m just naïve. In the center of this fiasco is Sen. Mary Landrieu, who will stand for re-election in 2014. A self-described centrist Democrat from a state that has voted Republican in the past four presidential races, Landrieu cast a deciding vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act in the Senate when it approved it in 2010. An outraged Landrieu took the floor of the Senate Monday to read a letter from a constituent who was notified that his/her health insurance coverage would be cancelled because it didn’t adhere to ObamaCare’s dictates.
It’s possible Landrieu’s colleagues would have taken her seriously if she hadn’t voted against a measure three years ago that would have prevented ObamaCare from forcing the cancellation of policies that didn’t meet its guidelines to the letter. Yet, there was Landrieu — all snippy and in a tizzy — vowing to do something about this injustice that some 90,000 of her constituents will be subjected to in the coming weeks. Go Mary go.
All the while, Landrieu is sticking to her guns, maintaining her support for ObamaCare as a whole. The pickle Landrieu is in today is a prime example of why next year’s Senate election in Louisiana is so important. To a lesser extent, it’s an example of why the special election in the 5th District congressional race is important, too. Want to get rid of ObamaCare? It all begins by electing candidates who will vote to repeal it under any and all circumstances.
Sam Hanna, Jr. is publisher of The Ouachita Citizen, and he serves in an editorial/management capacity with The Concordia Sentinel and The Franklin Sun. Hanna can be reached by calling (318) 805-8158 or by emailing him at samhannajr@samhannajr.com.
