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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid believes Obamacare will naturally lead to a government-run single-payer health care system – just like in Canada.
During an appearance on the Las Vegas public television program Nevada Week in Review, the Democratic leader stated that the United States needs to work its way past insurance-based health care.
“What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.
When a panelist on Nevada Week in Review asked the Democrat if he meant that America would totally abandon insurance as a part of the health care system, Harry Reid said, “absolutely, yes.”
When citing historical precedent for the process involved with making such an instrumental change to the American way of life, Reid pointed to the post-World War II labor union and auto industry negotiations. During that era employer-based health insurance coverage went from an obscure concept to commonplace.
He also noted that Democrats tried but failed to get a government-run option into the health care law.
“We had a real good run at the public option … don’t think we didn’t have a tremendous number of people who wanted a single-payer system. We had to get a majority of votes. In fact, we had to get a little extra in the Senate, we have to get 60.”
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Reid may want Obamacare to be a rousing success and pave the way for a single-payer system in America, but the Affordable Care Act website – HealthCare.gov — would have to become functional before any of that could take place. Consumer Reports is now advising Americans to stay away from the Obamacare website until the latest round of tech gurus can fix the non-functioning marketplace. As previously reported by Off The Grid News, the task of creating the Obamacare website was outsourced to a Canadian software company.
An excerpt from the Consumer Reports warning about the Affordable Care Act website reads:
“If all this is too much for you to absorb, follow our previous advice: Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can. Hopefully that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made. The coverage available through the marketplaces won’t begin until January 1, 2014, at the earliest, and you have until December 15 to enroll if you need insurance that starts promptly.”
The report goes on to note that approximately 9 million people have visited the website and only 271,000 have created accounts. There is no way to know how many of the people who visited the site actually interested in signing up for Obamacare and how many were just curious. The frustration over the inability to merely create an account on the Healthcare.gov website even has long-time Obama supporter Jon Stewart sharing his head.
Jon Stewart’s Obamacare speech critique after the president’s press conference about the fiasco is as funny as it is accurate. The Comedy Central host said, “Yes, apparently the Healthcare.gov website has 99 problems, but a glitch is all of them.” He also noted that the “first step” – accessing the site — does not even work.
President Obama gave out the phone number to the health care hotline during a speech, prompting many to feel the speech sounded like a television infomercial.
“The point is the call centers are available. You can talk to somebody directly and they can walk you through the application process. Once you get on the phone with a trained representative, it usually takes about 25 minutes for an individual to apply for coverage, about 45 minutes for a family. Once you apply for coverage, you will be contacted by email or postal mail about your coverage status.”
Fox News analysis and radio show Sean Hannity dialed the digits live on the air. After informing a staffer named “Davis” that he was on the show and getting permission to continue, two baffling things occurred. First, Davis had no idea that President Obama had just give out the call center phone number. Second, Davis could only help Americans fill out an application over the phone if they had already created an Obamacare account on the non-working website.
