Related: Slow Saturday Special: Obama Apology Unacceptable
"Fraud rises with health care confusion; Fake websites and con men snare retirees" by Susanne Craig and Jessica Silver-Greenberg | New York Times, November 10, 2013
NEW YORK — To the list of problems plaguing President Obama’s health care law, add one more — fraud....
And we were told the exact opposite would occur.
Some level of fraud or abuse is predictable with any big government program, and administration officials expected a few bad actors to emerge, but now the technical failures troubling the HealthCare.gov website, as well as the law’s complexity, threaten to make matters worse. Only a tiny fraction of Americans have been affected, but state authorities and the FTC are reviewing the issue aggressively....
Never mind that, what does the blue highlights say about what I have been told is the greatest economic and political system in the history of mankind? Oh, fraud was predictable, no big deal, taxpayers. Why does the media view fraud and corruption as an oh-well type matter with such callous disregard? Just the co$ts of doing bu$ine$$, 'eh?
While it is difficult to quantify the problem, interviews with authorities in states including California, Florida, Illinois, and New York suggest that fraud is a growing worry.
Websites are particularly difficult to police.
Why? The NSA has everything.
“We are remaining vigilant, since we anticipated that the law was so complex that scam artists would take advantage of it,” said Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa.
Question: Why did the in$urance indu$try write such a crappy bill for Congre$$?
In New York and Illinois, attorneys general are investigating at least two firms that they suspect of fraud, according to people briefed on the matter.
Since October, attorney general offices in 36 states have been holding conference calls about the emerging dangers every two weeks.
The most prevalent complaints involve older Americans....
Preying on the elderly?
Authorities warn that in some cases the come-ons are a ruse to get people to divulge sensitive Medicare and banking information.
It's like those shiny and fresh newspaper sitting on the rack and calling to me.
The pitches usually come with a telephone call or knock at the door. Someone claiming to be a government official offers help or warns residents....
Don't they all?
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Sticking with the fraud theme:
"Pressure building on Obama for health care fix; Bipartisan push is on to let people keep old coverage" by Michael D. Shear and Robert Pear | New York Times, November 13, 2013
WASHINGTON — Under intense bipartisan pressure to answer mounting consumer complaints about the botched health care rollout, White House officials are struggling to make good on President Obama’s promise that Americans can keep their insurance coverage without undermining the new health law or adding unaffordable costs.
After the president’s apology last week for wrongly assuring Americans that they could retain their health plan if they wanted, senior White House aides said the president wanted to ensure that people who were forced off older policies with less comprehensive coverage were not stuck with a higher monthly premium to replace their insurance. But administration officials declined to say how they might achieve that goal, how much it would cost, or whether it would require congressional approval.
At the same time, officials signaled the president’s strong opposition to calls from across the political spectrum — including one Tuesday from a key ally, former president Bill Clinton — to support bipartisan legislation that would allow people to keep their current insurance plans even after provisions of the Affordable Care Act go into effect next year.
White House officials refused to discuss in detail what options Obama was considering. But they made clear that the president was skeptical of any solution that would allow insurance companies to continue selling what officials consider to be substandard policies....
The idea of passing legislation to allow all Americans to keep their coverage got a fresh boost Tuesday when Clinton added his voice to the debate. In an interview, Clinton joined the intensifying criticism of the health care rollout and called on Obama to accept a change in the health care law that would allow insurance companies to keep selling policies that do not meet the new standards.
“I personally believe even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,” Clinton said in the interview, published by Ozy, an Internet magazine.
Clinton, who tried to pass a health care overhaul during his presidency, has been a powerful advocate for the Affordable Care Act, especially among the president’s key Democratic constituencies. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is weighing a White House bid in 2016 that could be affected by the fortunes of the health care law.
That's the health Bill is worried about: he wants to be the first First Husband.
The former president followed a steady stream of Democrats who have announced their support for legislation to let people keep their coverage. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, endorsed one such effort by Senators Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, both Democrats.
“Since the beginning of September, I have received 30,842 calls, e-mails and letters from Californians, many of whom are very distressed by cancellations of their insurance policies and who are facing increased out-of-pocket costs,” Feinstein said. “The Landrieu bill is a common-sense fix that will protect individuals in the private insurance market from being forced to change their insurance plans.”
Landrieu said the cancellation notices “should have never gone out.”
“We said and the president said over and over that if people have insurance and they like the insurance they have, they can keep it,” Landrieu said. “That is my bill. That is the single focus of my bill. It is not to undermine the Affordable Care Act. It is to strengthen it and to keep our promise to millions of Americans.”
It's as predicted, the Democrats are deserting ship faster than the Republicans because this is going to be an albatross around them in 2014.
The White House declined to comment specifically on Landrieu’s bill, but said that another effort by Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, and the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was especially problematic. Under Upton’s bill, an insurer that had individual policies in effect on Jan. 1 of this year could continue to “offer such coverage for sale during 2014” in the market outside an exchange.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, the senior Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, denounced the bill as an effort to undermine the law.
Every little bit helps.
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"Obama’s health care law roils Democrats" by Noah Bierman and Tracy Jan | Globe Staff, November 14, 2013
WASHINGTON — The White House is scrambling to devise a plan to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from losing their health insurance as the growing political damage from President Obama’s health care law threatens to divide the Democratic Party over his signature achievement.
House Democrats berated White House officials during a private meeting Wednesday, imploring them to devise a way to stop the rash of insurance policy cancellations before they are forced on Friday to take a politically difficult vote on a Republican-sponsored remedy.
Individual health insurance policies that represent about 5 percent of the market are being terminated because they do not meet the Affordable Care Act’s minimum coverage standards. The cancellations have created a political storm for Obama, who has repeatedly promised that Americans who liked their existing plans could keep them under his health care law.
The tense meeting between White House officials and House Democrats was among the many low points this week in the Affordable Care Act rollout, which is still going poorly six weeks after the bungled launch of the health care marketplace website.
The administration conceded Wednesday that only 106,000 Americans — a fifth of what had initially been estimated — had signed up for coverage in October, when the health insurance marketplaces opened for business.....
Despite the weak numbers, the administration sought to project confidence, once again pointing out that Massachusetts, with its first-in-the-nation universal health care launch in 2007, also experienced low enrollment in its first month.
‘‘We expect enrollment will grow substantially throughout the next five months,’’ Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a conference call with reporters. ‘‘Even with the issues we’ve had, the marketplace is working and people are enrolling.’’
Self-delusion is an illness. I hope she has Obamacare.
Obama’s job approval ratings have plunged to their lowest point in his presidency, just 39 percent in one poll.
Meaning it is really about 20%.
Earlier this week, former president Bill Clinton admonished Obama to live up to his promise of permitting people to keep their existing insurance if they wanted.
Oh, Obama had to love that. Hillary hasn't even declared for the nomination yet.
But other Democrats, including Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, are sticking by the president, saying it is important to eliminate substandard plans.
Related: Mass. policies to meet US standard
Massachusetts generally has a don't ask, don't tell policy plan. You don't ask to use it, and they don't tell yo anything.
Obama has taken responsibility for the website problems and apologized.
Sort of.
But instead of improving, the atmosphere for the president and his health plan continues to deteriorate.
Some Democrats are joining Republicans in introducing bills that would permit people to keep nonconforming plans, even though they provide weak, gap-filled coverage.
Bipartisanship at last!
Republicans, who just weeks ago were badly tarnished by the government shutdown, have been gleeful.
The government what?
They pointed to polling that showed that, even as Republicans are held in very low esteem, Americans were equally divided over which party they would support in the next House elections. A month earlier, the GOP had been 9 percentage points behind Democrats in the same poll.
“You point that to Obamacare, not just the rollout, but the cancellations,” said Ian Prior, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We think this is the tip of the iceberg.’’
House Democratic leaders are standing with the president in opposition to a Republican House bill that would allow insurance plans that do not meet the law’s standards to remain on the market through 2014. But a trickle of Democratic defections could accelerate by Friday’s scheduled vote unless the White House comes up with its own plan to provide a reprieve on cancellations.
Heading for the political lifeboats!
Two House Democrats are on record as co-sponsors of the Republican bill.
I need more Democrats, please! Women and childr.... well, women anyway!
A third, Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, said Wednesday afternoon that she was “favorably inclined” to vote for it.
“We should hold that promise,” Sinema said, referring to Obama’s promise that Americans could keep their health care plans.
Yes, step this way, Madame.
Ron Barber, another Arizona Democrat, expressed interest in the bill and said he would make up his mind on Thursday.
There is one letting men on.
“There are a lot of Democrats who are really concerned as I am,” Barber said. “We want to see the American people treated fairly and properly, and apparently that’s not happening, so we need to fix that.”
Massachusetts Democrat John Tierney, who is considered to be the most vulnerable of the state’s all-Democrat delegation to a Republican challenge in 2014, has not decided whether to support the House Republican bill. He has rarely strayed from House Democratic leadership positions, so his ambivalence is telling.
Pelosi losing power?
“It is incumbent upon the White House to find a resolution now that allows them to keep their commitment,” Tierney said in a prepared statement.
On Wednesday, the White House was racing to do just that....
As tempting as it may seem to some Democrats, the House Republican bill, the Keep Your Health Plan Act sponsored by Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, would allow insurers to continue selling subpar plans to consumers, a prospect the White House, party leaders, and other supporters of the law warn is just another way for Republicans to undercut health care insurance changes.
A separate Senate bill, sponsored by Democrats Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Dianne Feinstein of California, would grandfather in consumers who have policies that don’t meet the law’s new guidelines.
“The Landrieu bill is bad. The Upton bill is disastrous,” said Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was the architect of the state’s health insurance law. If either passes, he said, insurers would lose money and consumers would see rate spikes in 2015.
Advocates say some pain is inevitable to reform insurance markets. In Massachusetts, about 150,000 residents were kicked off their plans after the state’s law imposed minimum coverage standards, including prescription benefits, beginning in 2009.
Democrats are hoping the website problems will disappear over time, and the positive effects of insuring hundreds of thousands of people who were previously denied or could not afford coverage will trump the negatives.
But with 2014 midterm elections looming for lawmakers, patience will be in increasingly short supply.
Especially with premiums skyrocketing because young people are ambivalent or ignorant and will likely just accept a penalty (paying will be another matter). Sorry, but they don't pay attention to this crap like an old man does.
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"Obama yields on below-par insurance; Lets policies continue for a year, accepts blame for consumer uproar" by Tracy Jan and Noah Bierman | Globe Staff, November 15, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama, bowing Thursday to pressure from Democratic allies and seeking to ease the controversy engulfing his health care law, said he will allow insurance companies to continue providing insurance coverage that falls short of new standards for an additional year.
Except it just created another controversy!
Brought about by a self-inflicted wound, it was a major concession by the president on a core element of his 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Purging substandard plans, with their low premiums but weak and patchy coverage, is considered crucial to overhauling insurance markets....
But Obama, by his own admission, blundered. He promised Americans multiple times that they would be allowed to keep their existing insurance under his new law, if they liked it. So when insurance companies sent out hundreds of thousands of cancellation notices for noncompliant individual plans in recent weeks, it created a political furor.
“That’s on me,’’ Obama said Thursday in a White House news conference, as he announced he would honor his earlier promise by delaying the standards for existing plans for one year. “That’s something I deeply regret.”
Yeah, my bad. Everything okay now?
Combined with the botched rollout of the healthcare.gov online insurance marketplace, which is still under repair more than six weeks after its launch, Obama said the troubled start of the new health plan has caused political damage for his Democratic allies in Congress who supported it.
He apologized for “not executing better,’’ but said the broader goal of covering the uninsured remains intact.
“These were two fumbles on a big game,’’ he said. “But the game is not over.’’
I'm sick of the f***ing football and sports metaphors!
Obama was forced to act after frustrated Democrats in Congress backed legislation to restore coverage and block further cancellations in the individual market, which represents about 5 percent of health policies in the United States. The allowance would only be available for those enrolled in the substandard plans as of Oct. 1.
I'm also sick of the lie being repeated and repeated.
Obama’s move seemed to cool some of the immediate anger from within his own party. But Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina continued to criticize the law, capitalizing on the sense of confusion and frustration. He dismissed Obama’s change as a “duct tape solution.’’
It was unclear whether the change would actually result in significantly fewer cancellations.
It will not if you keep reading.
And for affected consumers, a one-year reprieve may just deflect anger toward a new target: insurance companies.
Then it is a genius political move!
Insurers who have already canceled plans may choose not to revive them, because premiums and coverage have already been calculated for new plans based on assumptions about the new standards.
Yeah, they were all ready to go and Obama threw in the wrench!
A health insurance trade group warned that the president’s action could be disruptive.
Uh-oh.
Like I said, new controversy.
“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a statement.
If fewer young, healthy consumers buy coverage through the healthcare.gov marketplace, Ignagni warned, “premiums will increase and there will be fewer choices for consumers.”
Which is what we were told would not happen!
The Affordable Care Act requires coverage of an array of services, including primary care visits and maternity care. The administration was banking on many of the people who have received cancellation notices being able to sign up for that improved coverage on the marketplaces that debuted in October. Many would be eligible for Affordable Care Act subsidies, so the premiums for millions of people would be as cheap as or cheaper than their old, less-comprehensive plans.
Like I have been saying, it was a cash grab so they could sell investors Treasury bonds.
But many consumers who tried were unable to make that transition because the healthcare.gov website was plagued by a host of technical woes that prevented them from signing up.
Obama’s reprieve will not be universally available.
What?
Obama said individual state insurance commissioners can decide not to participate. Washington State immediately announced it would not participate in Obama’s offer of a one-year extension.
To continue offering the substandard plans, insurers will be required to tell customers what they are missing out on by not signing up for a new plan on healthcare.gov.
“It is important to understand that the old individual market was not working well,” Obama said. “It’s important we don’t pretend that somehow that’s a place worth going back to.’’
The devil you know.... ??
Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who was an architect of the landmark 2006 Massachusetts health plan and an adviser on the Obama plan, said Obama’s move seemed like a reasonable compromise given the deep problems encountered with the rollout. But eliminating weak insurance plans from the marketplace remains an integral part of preventing insurance companies from denying insurance coverage and jacking up premiums for people with preexisting conditions.
“What this whole debate misses is that Obamacare is the least disruptive way we can fix insurance markets in America to achieve the goal of nondiscriminatory insurance,” Gruber said.
But people wanted more, he observed. “They wanted a free lunch. They wanted to fix discriminatory insurance markets without inconveniencing anyone who holds discriminatory insurance. You can’t do that.”
Yeah, us taxpaying people always wanting a handout. Makes it sound as if we are all a bunch of bankers or war profiteers.
Jon Kingsdale, former head of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, said Obama’s announcement leaves many questions unanswered as state insurance commissioners in 50 states figure out if and how to carry forward the plan.
“They’re kicking it to the commissioners of insurers, saying ‘You figure out how to implement this,’ ” Kingsdale said. “The health plans are quite cranky because they have all made plans under one set of assumptions and now the rules of the game have changed literally after they have suited up and gone out on the court.”
Sports again, and no one seems to mind when it's the people getting $crewed that way.
Unlike a Republican plan that the House is expected to vote on Friday, the president’s relief plan would not allow the substandard plans to be sold to new customers.
Several Democrats had indicated prior to Obama’s plan that they would support the Republican bill.
No longer a broken city.
By announcing the plan one day before the vote, Obama helped House minority leader Nancy Pelosi maintain stronger Democratic unity in the chamber, although a modest number of party defections Friday still remained likely.
I think it will be more than modest.
Divisions among Democrats also continued in the Senate, where Democrats have introduced a bill to allow existing policyholders to keep below-standard plans indefinitely. Following Obama’s announcement, Senate Democratic leaders indicated they were unlikely to bring anything to the floor, to prevent a full-scale revolt.
So this is all about nothing?
“There is no need for a legislative fix for this issue,” said Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and the assistant majority leader.
Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat who initiated the bill, and other cosponsors, including Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, said they would push forward.
“The president’s announcement this morning was a great first step and we will probably need legislation to make it stick,” Landrieu said.
Republicans vowed to keep up the fight against the president’s largest achievement straight into the 2014 election season. House Speaker John Boehner took a shot at Obama....
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Related: Brigham and Women’s doctor could be next US surgeon general
“People view the surgeon general’s office as about as effective as the Obamacare website, so I don’t think there’s a lot of concern about who’s in the job.”
Or who is running which branch of government these days.
"Obama’s health care turnabout perplexes insurers, policyholders" by Tracy Jan | Globe Staff, November 16, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama may have secured a measure of political relief for himself by allowing substandard insurance policies to be renewed for another year. But his abrupt about-face has triggered confusion and uncertainty for insurance companies and hundreds of thousands of policyholders, whose efforts to obtain coverage were thrown into limbo.
Uh-oh.
Unless he starts another World War (or Israel starts it for him), this will be his legacy.
Obama’s announcement on Thursday caught health plan executives by surprise.
I thought that was important!
It was a major policy rollback with complex implications for health insurance markets, upsetting carefully laid plans to move people from weak insurance to stronger insurance, as the 2010 Affordable Care Act requires.
While insurance executives met with Obama at the White House on Friday to review implications of the shift, policyholders across the country who have received termination notices because their plans do not meet new standards were frustrated and baffled.
Their options will now depend on which state they live in, and whether their insurance company decides to act on Obama’s request and delay the switch to more comprehensive coverage.
Some were still upset that Obama broke his original promise, that people who liked their existing plans would be able to keep them under his law. The president’s belated effort to honor that promise this week did little to soothe the anger of New Hampshire attorney Kysa Crusco, a 37-year-old mother of two. “The president told me that if I like my health insurance, I could keep it. And that shouldn’t have an expiration date,” said Crusco, who has been covered under a nonconforming plan that did not cover maternity care. That fit her needs because, she says, she doesn’t plan to have more children.
Crusco received a cancellation notice from Anthem Blue Cross last week, and now she is uncertain what she will do.
“This is going to be up to the state and health insurance companies now,” Crusco said. “It’s really upsetting. I have no idea what my cost is going to be. I have no idea whether I’m going to be able to keep my doctors.”
Consumer anxiety has been heightened by continued problems with the federal health insurance website, healthcare.gov, that have prevented millions of Americans from signing up for new coverage. The website is in place for residents of 36 states that have not launched their own online marketplace, including New Hampshire and Maine.
Administration officials are racing to repair the site to handle demand for replacement health insurance. The site also must handle millions of uninsured consumers who have until March 31 to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that most Americans obtain insurance.
The disastrous rollout of the health law, which was meant to address the patchwork nature of health insurance, has instead opened up more fissures and inequities between states.
Leveling the playing field is an important goal of the Affordable Care Act, with its mandate that nearly all Americans buy insurance of fairly uniform quality. Forcing young, healthy premium-payers into a big insurance pool balances risk and costs, reducing the relentless upward pressure on premiums.
And it boost the bottom line for insurers!
Pushing people out of weak, patchy coverage in the individual market into better coverage at group rates on the online marketplace, meanwhile, will be a better deal for millions of policyholders — especially those in the lower- and middle-income brackets who qualify for government subsidies. That is why insurance experts see Obama’s decision Thursday as a step backward from meaningful market reform....
Thirty-nine Democrats — including Representatives Ann McLane Kuster and Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire — joined Republicans on Friday in approving a House bill to allow insurers to maintain subpar health plans during 2014....
Wow, that is a LOT!
On Friday, Obama convened a group of insurance executives, including Tufts Health Plan chief executive James Roosevelt Jr., for a meeting at the White House. Roosevelt did not respond to a Globe request for comment....
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Let's get the good news!
"Pace of enrollments on health site accelerates; Problems persist; officials consider new way to sign up" by Michael D. Shear | New York Times, November 19, 2013
WASHINGTON — Opponents of the health care law are already moving on to their next target, but the concern is bipartisan....
The running battle against the health law has kept White House officials on their heels. As they work to respond to one set of problems, the law’s opponents move onward. Republicans began with attacks on the website’s functionality, shifted to millions of cancellation notices going to people whose policies did not meet the law’s coverage standards, and are now pressing the security case.... yet another front: rate shocks that Republicans insist are coming.
That's not going to help Dems in 2014!
The computer security question may be particularly delicate. The federal insurance website collects a broad range of personal information, including applicants’ Social Security numbers, addresses, income, and health information.
Damn right! They can't secure the health information?
House Republicans have latched on to a final report by the Mitre Corp., one of the firms hired to assess the security of the site. Jason Providakes, Mitre’s general manager, will put some distance between his company and that assessment in a hearing at the House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday.
We call it pa$$ing the buck, but....
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Also see: Obama signs bill to help students with allergies
"Mandated cuts expected to be more painful in ’14; Defense, Justice, housing would be among hardest hit" by Andrew Taylor | Associated Press, November 12, 2013
WASHINGTON — The first year of the automatic cuts didn’t live up to the dire predictions from the Obama administration and others who warned of sweeping furloughs and big disruptions of government services.
But the second round is going to be a lot worse, lawmakers and budget analysts said.
One reason is that federal agencies that have tapped surplus funds to ease the pain of sequestration had been able to make it through the automatic cuts relatively unscathed.
What agencies have $lu$h funds, er $urplu$ funds when the government is in debt and bankrupt?
Employee furloughs haven’t been as extensive as feared and agencies were able to maintain most services....
Related: Taxpayer Dollars Put to Good Use
The Justice Department found more than $500 million in similar money that allowed agencies such as the FBI to avoid furloughs altogether.
Finding replacement cuts is the priority of budget talks scheduled to resume this week, but many observers think the talks won’t bear fruit. Both sides appear to see leverage.
Democrats are hoping that $20 billion in new Pentagon cuts below levels imposed by sequestration will force Republicans to yield.
Didn't work last time.
Republicans say far more of their members are willing to keep the cuts, which appears to have added to the resolve of GOP negotiators....
A drop in participation and lower-than-expected food prices allowed a widely supported food program for low-income pregnant women and children to get through this year without having to take away anyone’s benefits.
Where?
Related: Cut in food stamps brings wide worry
But we have money to train Libyan troops and build Afghan Army barracks!
A second round of automatic sequestration cuts could mean some women with toddlers lose coverage next year.
Couldn't "find" any money for them?
To avert furloughing air traffic controllers and disrupting airline flights this year, Congress shifted $253 million in automatic cuts to airport construction funds.
Those funds are needed to meet a requirement to install runway safety areas at all airports by 2015, so that pot of money won’t be available to bail out controllers again.
Related: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: FAA Fraud
WTF, FAA?
Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, said agency budget chiefs ‘‘squeezed everything to get through the first year thinking we would come to our senses.’’
Someone is getting $queezed!
However, most of those accounting maneuvers were one-time steps. The automatic spending cuts in 2014 promise to be far more painful.
We were told the last round... sigh.
For the time being, Congress has frozen 2014 spending at 2013 sequestration levels while negotiators seek a budget deal that would ease some of the automatic cuts.
Absent a deal, the spending ‘‘caps’’ on agency operating budgets will shrink by another $20 billion or so, with most of that money squeezed out of the Pentagon.
Nowhere will the effects be felt more than at the Justice Department.
‘‘Justice had like half a billion dollars in unobligated balances and so they brought that back and that made it possible for them not to have any furloughs anywhere in the Justice Department, Bureau of Prisons or FBI or whatever,’’ said Scott Lilly, a former top House Appropriations Committee aide. ‘‘But they’ve used that up, so they’re going to get hit much harder this year than they did last year.’’
The situation will also worsen at the Pentagon, where the first round was difficult, eroding combat readiness and grounding Air Force squadrons, officials said.
‘We might as well shut down the Pentagon,’’ said House Armed Services Committee chairman Howard ‘‘Buck’’ McKeon, a California Republican. ‘‘You’d better hope we never have a war again.’’
Sounds good to me!
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Related: Health law’s problems yield chances for GOP
