Rep. Frank Pallone D-NJ, made a complete fool of himself on “The Kelly File” last night, so for his refusal to acknowledge reality, he is our Daily Dunce.
Megyn Kelly could not believe Rep. Frank Pallone would not acknowledge reality, which is that President Barack Obama broke his promise that all Americans would be able keep their health care plans under Obamacare, a claim that has proven to be false. Rep. Pallone made the lockstep liberal anti-insurance company argument, claiming that insurance companies got “caught” selling “lousy,” “skeletal” plans that offered little coverage at a high cost. With Obamacare, however, the companies will now offer what he claims are better plans at an “affordable price.”
Unfortunately, all of the claims made by Rep. Frank Pallone, are entirely false. He also argued, “The bottom line is, if you are selling a lousy policy at a price that is too high, nobody is going to buy it. And so they are canceling these policies because they know people won’t buy them. It’s a competitive marketplace, that’s the problem,” Pallone said.
As Megyn Kelly correctly stated, “they were buying them. There were 15 million people buying them.” And it gets worse.
First, the plans were not “skeletal” plans at all, they were tailored to the needs of consumers. Men do not need to purchase coverage for prenatal care, and if they did, it wouldn’t mean that they have better than sub-standard coverage, as Pallone and other Democrats are ridiculously arguing. The strategy Pallone and other Democrats are taking is clear. The insurance held by millions of Americans has been deemed “substandard,” because they said so, forget the fact that people can’t afford to pay for coverage they do not need.
Second, any reference to ObamaCare as “capitalism” is absolutely false, and preposterous. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of free market capitalist competition, which is how Republicans proposed to drive the cost of health insurance down, without a government takeover of the entire system.
Free market policy transactions were resulting in standard or above standard care that was tailored to the individual needs of and affordability for consumers, and at a fraction of the cost that ObamaCare plans range. The policies aren’t “lousy,” they were exactly what the consumers needed and could afford, which is why millions of Americans were buying them.
But Frank Pallone refused to concede that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius added regulations that were specifically tailored to force insurers to throw Americans with insurance plans off of their coverage. Again, Pallone outrageously referred to the dropping of Americans from their policies as “capitalism,” and Megyn Kelly did not let it pass.
“The capitalist private market is controlled by laws, including one called Obamacare, which imposed a bunch of regulations on them with which they must now comply, sir,” Kelly said as if she was teaching a first year economics student. But it is actually worse than Kelly explained it to be, because markets in which a government sets the rules, picks the players, and then deems which products are to be sold to who is not even capitalism, it is quasi crony fascism.
Choosing to remain in his alternate reality, Pallone repeated “You can’t sell the policy if nobody is going to buy it because it’s lousy. “But 15 million people did buy it! They bought it, and they were told they can keep it and now they can’t. And I gotta go, period,” Kelly quipped.
She actually had to apologize to the audience and tell them, “I tried.” Indeed, Rep. Frank Pallone is a dunce, to be sure, but we suspect he is one daily.
Don / November 1, 2013
My take on question during Wednesday’s Congressional hearing “Do men not have to buy maternity coverage?” (Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.)). Well yes, hypothetically male employees of large employers (large groups) had they themselves gotten pregnant, they have maternity coverage. That’s the way group health insurance in the workplace has always worked, that’s the way coverage on the state exchanges will work, and large risk pools is the proven way empirically to work. Would that representative be advising male constituents in her district to call the HR departments of their employers to be removed from maternity coverage? Of course not that would be wasting valuable company time, and talking points like this are wasting the American people’s time.
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