Aug 11, 2015

Astrue Not A Fan Of Obamacare

     I was wondering what Michael Astrue, the most recent Commissioner of Social Security, was up to. I found an opinion piece that he had done in May for The Weekly Standard, a right wing publication, on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which he and many others call Obamacare. I won't bore you with the details of Astrue's piece. I'll just list a few of the words he used and you can infer the rest:
  • Self-preservation
  • Waste
  • Fraud
  • Abuse
  • Criminal
  • Wreckage
  • Massive
  • Failure
  • Mislead
  • Stonewall
  • Failures
  • Reckless
     Astrue was a Massachusetts resident at the time that state implemented a health care plan devised by its Republican governor, Mitt Romney. Astrue was active in Massachusetts politics at the time. I can't find any record of him publicly criticizing Romney's plan. The Affordable Care Act was modeled after Romney's plan. It's no exaggeration to say that Obamacare is Romneycare writ large. If you hate the Affordable Care Act, you should have hated Romney's healthcare plan too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is old news. I guess it was a slow day.

Anonymous said...

How ironic. The man has no credibility. Who is he to criticize any government program or administrator for waste, fraud, or abuse? Wasn't he the one in charge during the Huntington situation when, according to the WSJ, 27 of Astrue's SSA ALJs were awarding benefits in 95% of their cases and the average SSA ALJ was awarding 60% of cases. Astrue seemed to be happily presiding over "paying down the backlog" until the newspapers started writing about it?