• • Approval Numbers
• • "No reasonable expectation of privacy"
• • Amazing: Landrieu Completely Throws Obama Under the Bus in First TV Ad
• • Kathleen Sebelius admits Obamacare sign-ups still 3 million short of goal
• • ObamaCare created a Medicaid time bomb

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I'm confused. Last week Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) said if she could vote for Obamacare again, she would. Now for some reason she's completely distancing herself from it?

If you are to believe this ad, President Obama lied to her constituents. Not her (via Politico)
But there's just one problem here: in 2009 Landrieu herself said if Americans liked their health care plans, they could keep them. Oops:

The ad spot above is deceptive and misleading. It puts all the blame on the president, when in truth she built support for -- and ultimately helped pass -- Obamacare. At the same time the ad paints her as a hapless bystander who (ahem) had no idea millions of Americans would lose their health care coverage. And now, of course, the good public servant that she is, she's working hard to "fix" a "glitch" she never saw coming.

I'm skeptical. From Guy's piece last October:
Read more see videos HERE

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said enrollments on healthcare.gov are surging but confirmed that the administration is still millions short of its target of signing up 3.3 million Americans by the end of December.

In testimony before an Energy and Commerce subcommittee Wednesday, Sebelius said improvements to the website have helped 258,497 Americans sign up for coverage under Obamacare through the end of November, bringing the total for the two months to nearly 365,000.

"As more Americans give healthcare.gov a second look, they're finding the experience is night and day compared to where we were back in October," she said in an opening statement. "And they're responding by shopping for plans and enrolling in greater numbers."

Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., who chairs the panel's health subcommittee, asked Sebelius to confirm his estimate that those sign-up numbers are nearly 3 million short of the administration's original goal for the first three months of online enrollment.

"Through the end of November, that is correct, sir," Sebelius responded.

For the law to operate properly, the administration needs to sign up a total of 7 million people in the exchanges by March 31, the deadline for 2014 enrollment.

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., who chairs the full Energy and Commerce Committee, though said the net numbers tell a far grimmer story.

Upton argued that more than 5 million Americans have lost their coverage because of new Obamacare regulations that are forcing insurers to stop offering many current plans. Even if the administration achieves its best-case scenario, "millions more Americans would have lost coverage than gained it in the first months of the rollout," he said.

Ahead of the hearing Wednesday morning, Sebelius announced that she was asking her department's inspector general to investigate the "structural and managerial policies" that led to the flawed launch of healthcare.gov.

She also called on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner to create and fill a new post for a CMS chief risk officer.

"I will instruct this office to look at IT and contracting and the risk factors that impeded" the successful launch ofhealthcare.gov and "how we can mitigate risk as we move forward," Sebelius said, noting that the officer would look into improving the federal government's contractor and procurement management.

Under questioning from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Sebelius said that the administration has "obligated $677 million" for IT costs associated with the healthcare.gov rollout and fixes and had already spent $319 million of that total as of October.

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The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far.

The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments.

Medicaid is already America's third-largest government program, trailing only Social Security and Medicare, as a proportion of the federal budget. Almost 8 cents out of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicaid. That's more than $265 billion per year.

Indeed, already Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for 48% of federal spending. Within the next few years, those three programs will eat up more than half of federal expenditures.

And it's going to get worse. Congress has shown no ability to reform Social Security or Medicare. With ObamaCare adding to Medicare spending, we are picking up speed on the road to insolvency.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that, in part because of ObamaCare, Medicaid spending will more than double over the next 10 years, topping $554 billion by 2023.

And that is just federal spending.

State governments pay another $160 billion for Medicaid today. For most states, Medicaid is the single-largest cost of government, crowding out education, transportation and everything else.

New York spent more than $15 billion on Medicaid last year, roughly 30% of all state expenditures. The Kaiser Foundation projects that over the next 10 years, New York taxpayers will shell out some $433 billion for the program.

But none of these projections foresaw that so many of ObamaCare's enrollees would be Medicaid eligible.

To be sure, the health-care law's designers saw the expansion of Medicaid as an important feature of their plan to expand coverage for the uninsured. Still, they expected most of those enrolling in ObamaCare to qualify for private (albeit subsidized) insurance.

It's beginning to look like that was just another miscalculation, one that could have very serious consequences for the program's costs.

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Oregon, once touted as a model for President Obama's health care law, signed up just 44 people for insurance through November, despite spending more than $300 million on its state-based exchange.

The state's exchange had the fewest sign-ups in the nation, according to a new report today by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The weak number of sign-ups undercuts two major defenses of Obamacare from its supporters.

One defense was that state-based exchanges were performing a lot better than the federal healthcare.gov website servicing 36 states. But Oregon's website problems have forced the state to rely on paper applications to sign up participants.

Another defense of the Obama administration has attributed the troubled rollout of Obamacare to the obstruction of Republican governors who wanted to see the law fail as well as a lack of funding.

But Oregon is a Democratic state that embraced Obamacare early and enthusiastically. Its outreach effort, which included a folk-style music video featuring a singer playing an acoustic guitar against a colorful and scenic backdrop, had been praised among the law's supporters.

After refusing for weeks to detail the extent of back-end problems with healthcare.gov, the Obama administration on Friday said a technical bug affected approximately 25 percent of enrollments on the federal exchanges in October and November.

Those technical bugs, separate from the troubles consumers had experienced accessing information on the website during the first two months, are posing a significant new problem for those who signed up and are expecting insurance coverage come Jan. 1.

One in four of those applications either did not get transferred to insurers, were transferred in duplicate form, or had major errors in information shared.

Insurers are supposed to receive the 834 Forms from healthcare.gov. The forms, meant to be read by computers, provide insurers with information on enrollees and what plan they have chosen. Without the information, insurers have no way of knowing who has signed up on the Obamacare exchanges and what coverage they need.

A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Friday suggested that the only way those who enrolled in October and November can be sure they will be covered in January is by paying their insurance bill and contacting their insurer to confirm their standing.

"I would certainly encourage any consumer that has a question of their insurance choice to contact the insurance company of their choice to get additional information," CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille told reporters Friday.

Bataille said CMS, along with the outside firm QSSI, is working furiously to fix the back-end problems, and has succeeded in reducing the number of erroneous 834 Form communications to insurers to 10 percent of all applications.

That error rate could still be affecting a significant amount of applications, especially considering that healthcare.gov is operating much more smoothly this week and has seen its traffic spike.

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