Who is that girl? The mysterious face of Healthcare.gov

You can bet she is not out there seeking autographs!

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER

Harry Reid says that Republicans will have to agree to tax increases to have any hope of achieving a grand budget bargain, saying Americans, 'including the rich,' are willing to pay more.

Bailey Comment: Does the statement Americans willing to pay more include all of the non working leaches that are sucking us dry already?

New Unemployment Data Reveals a Depressing State of Affairs

After a two-week delay, thanks to the good old government shutdown, the September jobs report was released on Tuesday.
The big takeaway – at least, according to most mainstream media outlets like The Wall Street Journal – is that the unemployment rate dropped from 7.3% to 7.2%.
Keep in mind, only four years ago, the headline unemployment rate stood at a staggering 10%.
So the labor market is improving, right? Wrong!
The official government unemployment rate is nothing but a statistical deception.
With that in mind, it’s time to serve up a big dollop of truth with the help of a timely chart. Not only can you handle it, you deserve it!
The true unemployment situation holds profound investment implications.
Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
The U.S. economy added 148,000 jobs in September.
Economists expected more (180,000). But the August number was revised up by 24,000 jobs.
So no one really panicked about the miss. Especially since the unemployment rate managed to tick a tenth of a percentage point lower.
Here’s the problem…
You’d think a downtick in the unemployment rate would mean that more people are employed.
However, there actually aren’t more people working. Not when we dissect the data based on the percentage of able-bodied Americans.
Turns out, the number of Americans 16 years or older who have decided not to participate in the nation’s labor force increased by another 136,000 in September.
All told, a record 90,609,000 Americans don’t have a job – and aren’t looking for one, either.
In turn, the labor force participation rate (the percentage of Americans who have a job or are looking for one) stands at a 34-year low.
A simple chart really drives home the depressing state of affairs.

As you can see, in previous post-recession periods, the precipitous drop in the unemployment rate was always accompanied by an increase in the labor force participation rate.
In other words, the economy was improving so much – and so many new jobs were being created – that it enticed people who previously stopped looking for work to dust off their resumes. And not only did they start looking for work again, they found it.
Not this time around.
The economy might be adding jobs, but it’s not adding enough to keep up with the growth in available workers. So the drop in the unemployment rate is a total fraud. It has materialized based on more and more people opting out of finding work, instead of actually finding it.
As James Pethokoukis from the American Enterprise Institute points out, if the labor participation rate was the same today as it was when the recession started, the unemployment rate would actually be 11.2% right now, not 7.2%.
How’s that for some truth?

Zombie.gov

Pinhead Jay Carney

Sebelius says she doesn't 'work for' those calling for her resignation

Bailey Comment: This one example of many just shows you how self-center all of these politicians are. 
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is rebuffing calls from Republicans for her to resign over the troubled launch of the ObamaCare sign-up website, saying those asking her to resign are “people I don’t work for.”
Sebelius gave the comments on a tour Thursday of an ObamaCare call center in Phoenix, which kicks off a multi-city tour by administration officials to promote the health care law amid the website's troubles.
Sebelius said “no one is getting fired” over the litches and that her main focus is to get the website up and running.
“The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don't work for, and who do not want this program to work in the first place,” she said. “I have had frequent conversations with the president and I've committed to him that my role is to get the program up and running and we will do just that.”
Sebelius’ comments come after Rep. John Fleming, R-La., sent a letter to President Obama signed by 33 Republican members of Congress calling for Sebelius’ resignation over the troubled health care law roll out.
“It’s clear that Secretary Sebelius has mismanaged the ObamaCare roll out and is in over her head. Before the train wreck is allowed to continue… before more taxpayer dollars are spent trying to fix what’s already wrong… and before the Secretary continues on her damage control tour, it’s time for the president to admit that, despite three-and-a-half years to prepare, his HHS Secretary has dropped the ball on this and needs to step down,” the letter reads.
Also Thursday, the contractors who built the health care website defended their work at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and claimed the government failed to properly test the system before launch.
CGI Federal and the other contractors repeatedly claimed that overall "end-to-end" testing was the responsibility of an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, as was the decision to go live on Oct. 1. They suggested more time was needed to work out the kinks.
Sebelius came under fire after telling the House Energy and Commerce Committee she was not also available to testify Thursday due to a “scheduling conflict,” but then travelling to Phoenix.
Sebelius was already taking heat for snubbing the committee while planning to attend a health care gala in Boston on Wednesday night.
It's unclear whether Sebelius' "scheduling conflict" was the gala, the Phoenix event or neither.
The committee says Sebelius is now expected to testify next Wednesday on the health care law.

ObamaCare and America’s journey into the Third World

One need only compare the sense of dispatch at Federal Express with time endured to send a package via the U.S. Postal Service to recognize the federal government doesn’t do things quite as well as the private sector.
It doesn’t even function as well as state bureaucracies.
Now ObamaCare, which socializes an industry larger than the economies of France or Britain, is proving Health and Human Services can be more incompetent than many Third World governments.
These past few weeks, poor Mexico could sign up urban poor for health care with less mess than Washington did folks needing insurance in San Antonio.

ObamaCare, which socializes an industry larger than the economies of France or Britain, is proving Health and Human Services can be more incompetent than many Third World governments.

In Europe, national health care systems deliver coverage for everyone, at remarkably lower cost, and in countries with per capita income comparable to the United States, a lot better care. The United States spends 18 percent of GDP on health care; Germany and Holland spend about 12 with better results.
One only need look behind the rollout of the federal health insurance exchanges to see why.
President Obama sees every decision -- from the timing for sending his mother-in-law a birthday card to those required for the rollout of the exchange -- as a political calculation.
The bureaucrats at Health and Human Services ordered CGI, the private contractor primarily responsible for designing the exchanges, not to permit visitors to browse prices anonymously.
That would allow young people with decent jobs to compare the prices they must pay for insurance, or face harsh penalties, with the subsidized prices offered other young folks with lower wage jobs.
After all, those jarring differences might cause young voters, whose allegiance to President Obama has been weakened by an economic recovery that does not deliver decent prospects for their advancement, to vote for whatever Republican promises less government and dares to run against Hillary Clinton.
This political decision was made less than a month before the exchanges went live and threw a terrible wrench into the rollout.
Like the IRS decision to harass conservative non-profits and community activists, it is not clear how high up that decision was made -- was it made by the HHS division directly supervising CGI, Secretary Sebelius or the White House?
Fast forward to today, when Ms. Sebelius laments that the online marketplace should require five years to construct and a year of testing.
Yet California, whose economy is larger than most countries and problems as complex, managed to get the job done. Its exchange and those of other states, designed independent of federal incompetence, are running well despite initial glitches.
A basic problem Washington does not like to admit is that the federal civil service is a refuge for overpaid, politically-motivated and distracted-from-task statists, who are often cynical about the private sector and insensitive to citizens’ needs.
Like the Godfather’s henchmen, they look to what will please their political masters and act accordingly, even if it tramples civil liberties.
Consider the allegedly independent handiwork of the IRS bureaucrats on non-profits and citizens supporting conservative causes or Justice Department’s wholesale violation of privacy of AP communications.
American universities’ schools of business and engineering attract the best and the brightest -- not so schools of public policy, education and the softer social sciences that train foot soldiers that fill offices at HHS, Justice and the like.
Democrats in congress are now raising questions about HHS reliance on private contractors, but the truth is federal government simply does not have the resources to pull off something as large and complex as the health care exchange.
If the president wants ObamaCare and other federal initiatives to succeed, then he and his cabinet can’t make every decision a political calculation. And they need to recognize that the government civil service needs much more competent employees, not political activists masquerading as public servants.