Was the President manning up for the shortcomings and downright misses of Obama care yesterday, or was he trying to shift the blame for this debacle onto scapegoats and enemies of his signature legislation? Let's break apart his comments and see if we can shed some light as to who he holds accountable for this experiment, shall we?
"I think everybody understands that I’m not happy about the fact that the rollout has been, you know, wrought with a whole range of problems that I've been deeply concerned about."
Point for manning up, he admits that things aren't going right and states his concern over that. But note the lack of possessiveness in regard to the rollout.
"The problems of the website have prevented too many Americans from completing the enrollment process, and that’s on us, not on them"
Ok, slight shifting of gears as 'I' has now become 'us', but he's still making a clear distinction that this is his, I mean their fault.
"So bottom line is in just one month, despite all the problems that we’ve seen with the website, more than 500,000 Americans could know the security of health care by January 1st."
Now he's trying to paint the numbers in a better light, despite the 7+ million Americans this is intended to help initially and the 4+ million who got hurt by the law, the fact that we have about 4% of them covered now is deserving of some praise. We could go off for hours about the expenses and misrepresenting of numbers this reflects, but for now let's just accept this as Obama's attempt at a silver lining.
"It’s gotten a lot better over the last few weeks than it was on the first day, but we’re working 24/7 to get it working for the vast majority of Americans in a smooth, consistent way."
Now it's we who are implementing the fixes, it's 'we' when it comes fixing things, but 'the' website is still without a possessor. Not 'my' website or 'our' website, just 'the' website.
"The other problem that has received a lot of attention concerns Americans who’ve received letters from their insurers that they may be losing the plans they bought in the old individual market"
Again, the problem isn't 'his' or 'our' problem, just 'the' problem. But the letters cancelling plans came from the insurance companies. Avoids saying the insurance companies cancelled the plans, but be backdoors the blame by saying the letters are all on the insurance companies.
"Now, as I indicated earlier, I completely get how upsetting this can be for a lot of Americans, particularly after assurances they heard from me that if they had a plan that they liked they could keep it. And to those Americans, I hear you loud and clear. I said that I would do everything we can to fix this problem. And today I’m offering an idea that will help do it."
Ok, the switching from who is ensuring a fix, but then placating who's fix it is, back to who's idea the fix is with the changing of 'I' to 'we' back to 'I' is getting a little hard to follow. "I said that I would do everything we can"
"And today I’m offering an idea that will help do it... Today we’re going to extend that principle both to people whose plans have changed since the law too effect and to people who bought plans since the law took effect."
Let me be clear, this is my idea, you're welcome, but other people are going to have to make it happen, so if it doesn;t work, then I can blame them on implementing it, but if it does work in placating the people, it was totally my idea.
"State insurance commissioners still have the power to decide what plans can and can’t be sold in their states"
Blame the States if this doesn't work.
"Now, this fix won’t solve every problem for every person, but it’s going to help a lot of people. Doing more will require work with Congress."
Blame Congress if this doesn't work.
"We’re also requiring insurers to extend current plans to inform their customers"
Blame Insurers if this doesn't work.
"If your received one of these letters I’d encourage you to take a look at the marketplace. Even if the website isn’t working as smoothly as it should be for everybody..."
Ok, this line doesn't even make sense. He's trying to put blame on individuals themselves while acknowledging that it may not be possible for those individuals to do anything about it.
"It is important to understand, though, that the old individual market was not working well. And it’s important that we don’t pretend that somehow that’s a place worth going back to."
Call up Websters, the word 'well' is now defined to mean 'the way that Obama wants it to'.
"And that’s why I will not accept proposals that are just another brazen attempt to undermine or repeal the overall law and drag us back into a broken system."
He spent almost a whole day coming up with these fixes, and all you haters who've known for years that this is exactly what would happen don't appreciate the amount of thinking this great man put in to these new never debated laws and regulations that pretty much contradict several provisions that are in the law with the language that it was 'voted' on with.
I could go on and on for a while, but the bottom line is that Obama's plan is to empower everyone else to try and fix this debacle of a law with not enough time for any of them to actually create and implement a fix is like Coach Obama telling his quarterback to win a game by throwing a 90 yard hail mary pass while only sending one wide receiver deep in a game that you are down by 9 points. You can make it look pretty dramatic, but in the end, there is no realistic way that you are going to fix this thing at this point. The American people are just going to have to keep doing what they always do, persevere despite all the attempts of this government to stop us.
So now on top of having restrictions on what kind of options you have for what level of coverage you can receive with your healthcare, and also yielding much of your choice in doctors, apparently now if your employer offers you a health insurance plan, you are required by law to accept it.
At least that is the way I interpret what Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelias said this week, under oath, to congress. When she says it's illegal for her to drop her healthcare and sign up for new coverage.
Of course I jest, because as a person with a and scrap of common sense, I know that there is no way the government can force you to accept compensation from your employer. Of course, had you asked me a year ago if the government can force you to purchase health insurance through a private company I would have told you the same thing, that you're nuts, so I guess anything is possible.
Let's make another rash assumption that Ms. Sebelius does in fact know that anyone can choose to not participate in an employers health care program and purchase insurance on their own, presumably through these exchanges. This should be considered a particularly short reaching assumption since anyone can load up the healthcare.gov site and see that there is nothing stopping you from switching so long as you acknowledge you forfeit any share of the premiums that your employer may be paying (pending being a legal citizen and not incarcerated, but let's not go there). The question then becomes what was she thinking when you dropped such a falsehood as "It's illegal."
Let's recall for a moment that she is the former governor of the great state of Kansas, making her a politician, and that politicians lie.
I'm sorry, you want a little more in depth analysis then that? Alright. She does get an offer of coverage from her employer, and, after turning 65 earlier this year, she also qualifies for Medicare Ms. Sebelius would not be eligible for any tax credits buying coverage. But given that she makes just shy of $200,000, chances are she earns too much for that to be a concern in the first place. Nobody enjoys spending money unnecessarily, but if you accept that as a reasonable reason to not sign up for Obamacare, you kind of shoot a brunt of the entire argument for Obamcare in the foot. That is making people spend more money then they would otherwise spend for health coverage they don't desire. Maybe she was frustrated by all of those trick questions like "How many people have signed up?" and "Why doesn't this $700,000,000.00 website work?". Perhaps she thought that, as a member of the executive branch, the ability to simply declare a law fell into her powers as well. We may never know the exact reason.
What does appear apparent is that signing up for healthcare that is not provided by your employer appears to be taking a seat in the 'things you love to do' list between waiting at the DMV and trying to get a straight answer from your congressman.
It appears that in the eleventh hour of the treasury department expending it's 'extraordinary measures' that the Senate Democratic and Republican leaders have reached a final agreement on a deal to reopen the government and extend its borrowing authority into February, with final passage looking increasingly possible by this evening.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, announced the completion of the agreement shortly after noon, and the Senate Republicans who had led the push to shut down the government unless President Obama’s health care law was gutted conceded defeat and promised not to delay a final vote.
The deal, with the government shutdown in its third week, appears to yield no concessions to the Republicans. The only item offered was some minor tightening of income verification for people obtaining subsidized insurance under the new health care law. Basically more red tape in a system that appears more like a mummy playing for a Cincinnati baseball team then a well constructed benefit to anyone.
It is important to once again review the principals behind the decision to allow a government shut down in the first place to better understand what this proposal means for the country. First off, this was a Republican endused shut down, trying to say the democrats caused this is like swinging your fists in the air in front of you while walking towards your younger sibling shouting "I'm swinging my arms around like this, and if you get hit, it's your own fault." It was a principled stand that I supported to try and shed some light on all the issues facing the country that where not only not getting fixed by any action in congress, but getting much much worse through the enacting of the American Care Act, aka Obamacare;
These problems are not new, we've been experiencing them either since the recession of 2008 or since the healthcare law has been passed. These along with so many other issues (Benghazi, NSA wiretapping, Guantanamo Bay) appear to be valid topics for discussion, but never at a time when the other side of the negotiating table hold any cards for which to actually have any leverage.
Think about this pattern, the Snowden release of NSA programs is a prime example, the story breaks on on June 5th and the public is appalled, two days later, Obama addresses the issue and explains that this can be up for debate in do far as what trade offs for security and privacy are acceptable. This debate never happens! A stupidly acting police officer at Harvard can get a summit at the White House but this issue is only deserving of a press conference and then is effectively deemed closed by this administration with a subtle 'I Got This!'.
Fast forward to July 23rd, no national conversations have occurred over the NSA issue, it has faded from the media spotlight with no changes, no resolution, no nothing. In an effort to strengthen their hand, propose a halt to the funding of all NSA gathering of this metadata. A specif, targeted bill that would effect nothing other then this program that is supposed to be up for debate, the White House response? "This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process."
The Press Secretary is saying debate in Congress is not informed, open, or deliberative.
This approach is used over and over again. Call is punting, call is dodging, call is waiting for the next scandal to come along and distract us all from the current debacle we are in. We seem to be incapable of discussing jobs, the budget, the debt ceiling, anything! And when the opposition party tries to press the issue, what are the terms that this President uses?
Now he wins, now he gets a huge bump in the debt ceiling and he gets to reopen the 14% of government that was closed, he gets to keep his law and this government just the way it is. He offered nothing as a concession, nothing as a reform, nothing that even acknowledged that there is a problem in the first place. No spending cuts, no jobs programs, nothing to spark the economy on this premise that he will not negotiate until we reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling. Sure, he says that once we allow him to spend a trillion dollars more then we take in that he is open for some debate. Debate what? He now has his healthcare reform, he has his de facto budget. We are going to be near tied for the largest revenue year in American history and we still can't get the deficit down to the levels from any year under the Bush Administration.
The decision to shut down the government was an attempt to get this administration to acknowledge that things are bad and only going to get worse with the healthcare overhaul. This attempt failed. We got caught up in WWII memorials and WIC checks. It becomes about the pain here and now rather then the pain of our economic condition that we appear to have grown a thick skin to. Pain that seemed to be intentionally made more poignant by extraordinary actions from this administration.
His objective wasn't to make people not like the shutdown, it was simply to distract us yet again, to not worry about the hurt from the poor economy, or the sticker shock felt from Obamacare, it was meant to make us believe the issue was the shutdown and nothing more. And it worked. Now we have no solutions and the republicans have no leverage.
I believe the old saying is, "the ball is in your court" Mr. President. Now, what is your plan?
The debate in Washington carries on. Although a deal on the debt ceiling may be fast approaching, word is that it is meant only as a deal that buys more time for the continuing resolution and funding for the American Care Act to continue. The debate needs to be swung back from the terrible side effects of a government shut down and returned to the reason for it, attempting to repeal the American Care Act. To this end, I present this essay as an argument to why having stringent criteria for the insurance industry renders the industry inept and incapable of solving the original problem America had with healthcare, the cost.
Many reports say that young, healthy people must enroll in the American Care Act (ACA) health exchanges to cover the cost of insuring people that are disproportionately sicker. It’s the corner stone of how insurance works. Charge everyone roughly the same rate for access to basically the same product. The people who use it less will subsidize the people who use it more.
The problem with the ACA or Obamacare is that the application of this perfect world scenario, as with many policies that look good on paper, is entirely impractical in practice.
In our present economic state, not only are many young people (and proportionately healthier) either unemployed or underemployed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that people under 40 owe 67% of the roughly $1.4 trillion that Americans owe on school loans. That’s on top of an average of several thousand dollars of credit card debt. The ACA is predicated on people who can scarcely afford the extra cost to subsidize care for small percentage of people that can neither afford insurance but also require large sums of money for their care.
In the present insurance system, younger, healthier people can purchase insurance for cheap, very cheap, and that money in premiums which rarely goes directly to healthcare for the insured can then be transferred to the populace that needs, helping subsidize their expenses so that premiums can be held below what the market would otherwise dictate. In a truly free market, people who do not need a lot of health care coverage would not be willing to spend a lot on health care coverage. The presented solution in the ADA? Force them to spend a lot.
Thus enters the government and the exchanges, forcing the disparity of premiums paid for by a healthy person and an unhealthy person to shrink to next to nothing. The trade off for the healthy is that they are now covered for a plethora of expensive drugs, services and procedures (i.e. birth control) that do very little to curb human behavior but pass more of the expense to people who would otherwise not need these services. Again, the government is dictating the conditions of which these 'markets' work.
This makes the health exchanges entirely non-progressive. The people in the equation that are spending much more now then they have in the past, people who can't afford more coverage and people that don't need more coverage. A 40% 'Cadillac' plan taxes and other provisions will help people who spend more money on health care coverage spend less. Even though in the current system that is money they freely hand over into the system.
The Government solution? Tax the rich more through a progressive tax code, then subsidize the poor who can't afford their new plans. Creating the criteria and ground work for an insurance industry that offers basically the same coverage, excludes no one, and allows money to walk from the wealthy down to the poor.
Many people, such as Jon Stewart, would look at this and cheer. Now insurance is little more then a middle man from the organization who is controlling the flow of money and dictates the criteria of care. Why not drop the failing insurance aspect of healthcare and convert to a single payer system? We'd save 10-15% and I'm sure the million or so employees of the industry would find new work in no time. Perhaps not a nightmare scenario if you have no problem handing over an entire industry to congress and whomever is in the White House at the time. Insurance is only a good deal when it actually works like insurance. Using insurance to pay for routine care and predictable healthcare needs makes it no longer insurance, but cost pooling. And once we change to a single payer system, it is almost impossible to go back.
Another flaw is that, by design, the ACA uses insurance to pay for routine healthcare services and distorts price signals and increases costs through layers of administration. ObamaCare’s requirements that insurance pay for even more routine care, especially for those who don't need it, than before codifies the fundamental flaw in the “insurance” (actually cost-pooling) “market” that we have today.
Instead, ObamaCare exacerbates and mandates everything that’s wrong with our current system while attempting to transfer costs in the exact wrong direction, from old and rich to young and poor. This is both extremely inefficient and completely unfair. The only thing that would make this worse is if Congress attempted to raise the fines for opting out enough to actually cover the enormous shortfall young people opting out in droves would create. Adding another dimension to the great scale that must find balance for an optimal and well funded healthcare system.
In any of these scenarios though, there is one key element that is missing. None of these issues actually do anything to lower the overall cost of healthcare, the ACA simply transfers the burden of deciding who pays how much for what level of care out of the hands of the people and free markets, and fully into the hands of the government. And anyone who thinks that government efficiency can drive the cost down, I ask you to look at local property tax rates now and 100 years ago, states sales taxes now and then, federal income taxes. Government does not find the cheapest way to do anything, they are experts in finding new things that we can't live without, usually something that has such little demand that it can't exist as a private enterprise, and then charging everyone for it, regardless of who it benefits. The savings of removing insurance from the equation will be replaced with and expansion of the IRS, and premiums will simply become another tax.
Imaging it, every hospital, every doctors office, every medical researcher at the behest of one government, there would be no profit in medicine, and without profit, the desire to create a new drug, a new life saving device, falls to those altruistic few. It's not that the government does not give dollars to research and development of new medical technologies, but we would forfeit almost all the sources of advancements that aren't funded by the government. You think that the lack of research occurring during a shutdown is frightening, In a shutdown occurring in a single payer system, all research would cease.
Meanwhile, payouts for Medicare are dropping, funding for Medicaid is being pushed on the states who can't afford it. Hospitals and doctors offices can't afford to take too many patients with government coverage. Fewer doctors are becoming available as the number of people with coverage increase.
That is what is lost in the current battle in Washington, while pictures of war vets going through barricades and park rangers closing, well, everything. The topic that Ted Cruz spent 20 of his 21 hours addressing has been lost, and unless we can find a way to dictate the debate and steer it back to this topic then the goal of preventing the transfer of our entire healthcare system over to one entity will be lost.
Today is October 1, 2013, and, of course that means the so-called "ObamaCare" Healthcare.gov website is ready for business.
Right?
Allthough the government IT department knew this day was coming for years, and should have been able to get over the initial hump of traffic coming through today, some allowance and patience needs to be granted.
Your's truly had to wait about 20 minutes just to load up the registration page
The bigger question is, with the government shutdown going on across the nation, who is available to fix it? Surely the IT staff is not considered a critical staffing, wait when active military need a separate funding appropriation just to avoid the country being left completely defenseless from invaders, both foreign and from outer space.
With SNL doing jokes about the complexity of signing up for a healthcare plan through the exchanges, the timing of these website issues couldn't be worse. People are trying to punch in personal information and have no idea if it's getting through. Expect this launch to add fuel to the political fires of trepidation and fear about the governments ability to manage such a huge scale project.
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" - Ronald Reagan
Yes, even thirty years ago people approached a government created solution with trepidation. It seems that at best the government is capable of creating a program that will require borrowing trillions from future generations to fund or at worse create a DMV style system that still fails to accomplish the task a newly developed department or agency was created for and charged with doing. I wanted to review some of the more spectacular failures and backfires of the government in this article and in a later post we'll start trying to see if a trend emerges.
1. Cracking down on Hackers
Increasing demonizing of hackers, for example by trying to add an extra layer of punishment on other crimes if they were done "on a computer." High-profile victims of this approach include Bradley Manning, Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown and of course Edward Snowden.
Attempt to intimidate an entire community in case anyone there might use computers to embarrass the US government or reveal its wrongdoings is now starting to backfire: The U.S. government's efforts to recruit talented hackers could suffer from the recent revelations about its vast domestic surveillance programs, as many private researchers express disillusionment with the National Security Agency.
Recently, Gen. Keith Alexander of the NSA has claimed that the next great threat against America is a cyber attack, for which he is developing armies of hackers to build not only a national defense against, but also an assault army for. This creates a clash of needs from discouraging hackers and trying to hire them.
In the end, the government tries to cover up how it fights wars at the expense of risking it's effectiveness of fighting wars in the future.
2. Prohibition
For thirteen years, beginning in 1920, the sale of alcohol was banned in the United States. The desire was as potent as 100 proof whiskey hat it passed as a constitutional amendment and was ratified in January of 1920, prohibition went into effect and began what would come to be described as "the bleakest time in American history" by that elderly, alcoholic relative we all have.
Without the evils of alcohol abuse, it was hoped that everything from unemployment to domestic violence would decrease dramatically. People would be free to focus their energy on other things like church, work, finances and raising their kids.
A score of gangster wars fighting over illegal distribution channels, a speakeasy in every town, and another constitutional amendment summarizes this era in American history as the ultimate failure to change American's social habits.
3. Strategic Hamlet Program
All Asians look alike to us, and that politically incorrect and inconvenient truth was never more prevalent then during the Vietnam War were frequently the regular farm folk who we were trying to liberate in South Vietnam, and the commie bad guys we were fighting, were often the same guys. The plan was to place residents in isolated and gated communities under the protection of foreigners armed to the teeth and resentful for being forcibly halfway across the planet from their families, or 'Hamlets' and keep them there until they love us and resent those who would want to do us harm.
In the end, the program somehow led to a decrease in support for the South Vietnam Diem’s regime and an increase in sympathy for the North Vietnamese Communist efforts.
4. Medicaid
The popular program that was designed to not leave anyone behind in the health insurance industry simply because of their inability to pay, sound familiar?
But it was soon realized that basic care wasn't going to cut it. When the Medicaid program’s special hospitals subsidy was added in 1987, it was supposed to cost $100 million annually, but wound up costing $11 billion annually within five years, and Medicaid spending is set to double over the next 10 years from $253 billion in 2012 to $593 billion in 2022.
Both Medicare and Medicade are exceeding the CPI and inflation, usually doubling it, meaning that this program continues to eat a continuously larger piece of that pie we like to call our wealth. The hope being that at some point here the nation will level out it's expanding healthcare costs, either through government imposed efficiency or scientists developing a pill that cures everything for $5. One of those is more realistic then the other.
5. Green Jobs Initiative
Half a billion dollars of the infamous stimulus plan of 2009 was earmarked to inject some life into the Green Jobs industry. Part of the Obama green energy program had the goal was to train 124,893 people, and place 79,854 (64%) in new green jobs. Two years in, the results of the green jobs program indicate that only 52,762 were trained, and only 8,035 got green jobs.
What does that math come out to? Each job costs tax payers about $62,000, more then the average wage for those jobs. President Obama’s first re-election campaign ad boasts of 2.7 million green energy jobs. But, nothing in the Departments of Energy, Labor or Commerce justifies such job claims. It was concluded that the vast majority of those jobs where either very loosely associated with 'green' industries, or existed prior to the 2008 election.
Of course this is just a smattering of countless other programs; No Child Left Behind (lots of money spent, no real results), Banning DDT (Malaria outbreak in Africa in the wake of banning this malaria killing chemical), The War on Drugs (Trillions spent, drugs are winning), Social Security (Currently running on IOU's.). One could go on and on, but what I'll dive into in part 2 is topics of who gets hurt when government programs go bad, what we learn from them, and what can be done before we leap into another 'fix' program.
"...That I'm delaying even more parts, that I'm sure you'll love, until after the election."
Now that the fourth 'Recovery Summer' is drawing to an end. The White House was supposed to take time to reintroduce the public to the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, and to teach the public how to sign up for benefits this fall, which is critical to the success of the law. If the young and healthy don't sign up, well, it is the difference between rates falling and rates rising for the elderly and sick, the persons Obamacare is suppose to help. In a nutshell, Obama needs the youth vote to save his legacy yet again.
The White House has had little time to focus on the fight to get young people signed up. Instead, this month kicked off with the Obama administration deciding to offer personal tours of the White House as a cheap alternative to the sequester cuts. Just kidding, yeah, he used the frequented God provision in Obamacare to delay a key piece of the law. The requirement imposed on larger employers of 50 or more people to provide coverage or risk fines. This is making many pundits cry foul because this leaves the individual mandate, and it's newly Supreme Court minted taxes, in place. The same individual mandate that is supposed to help force the young and healthy to go out and buy insurance. Take away the mandate, and premiums for Obamacare will, in most places, skyrocket.
Seeing a structural weakness in the law and a logical argument to hammer it with, the Republican-led House this week voted to delay the individual mandate for a year to match with the other decree. It was the 39th such vote trying to defund, delay, or outright dismiss the law. This has forced the White House to change their marketing from a sales pitch to sign up back to promoting the law itself. One can't help to chuckle a little at the idea that one man can declare a delay for one part of the law, but largest single body of elected officials in Washington is rendered mute when they try and do the same.
That one man, President Obama surrounded himself with smiling beneficiaries of the parts of the Affordable Care Act already in effect yesterday. Among those singled out: those who have been on the receiving end of a somewhat obscure provision requiring insurance companies to pay rebates to policyholders if the companies spend too much on administrative costs rather than medical expenses.
"Dan Hart, who's here, from Chicago, had read these rebates were happening, but he didn't think anything of it until he got a check in the mail for 136 bucks." -PresidentObama 7/16/13
Of course if Mr. Hart is a healthy 25 year old non-smoker who had individual insurance, then the 136 bucks for last year would cover only about 10% of his rate increase for this year, but I digress.
This year an estimated 8.5 million checks mailed out thanks to the law's "medical loss ratio" rules. That's actually down from the 13 million from last year and is expected to keep falling as companies adjust their business models to fit the new law. Also, since corporations aren't people and the majority of those checks are going to businesses, the number here is greatly inflated. And, while the President is talking about a few million people getting refunds of $100 or $200, Republicans have been talking in much more expansive terms.
Despite recent CBO projections that keep estimating a reduced number of people enrolling in the exchanges, based on numbers that are well under predictions, and fewer tax credits being handed out as a result in these lower enrollments, the net cost projections over ten years has been increasing every year and now sits in the net range of $1.3 to $1.4 Trillion dollars, net. I give a window since these estimates are constantly changing, usually for the worst. The February to May estimates resulted in a net cost increase of $40 billion.
Not enough people signing up mixed with ever increasing costs. I'd say that this is a disaster, but once again, I mention that this is what the bill is supposed to do. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but several years down the road, there will be only one fiscally responsible route to take, that is to force everyone into the healthcare exchanges. Once that is completed the rules of the exchanges will become so tightened as force most of the healthcare providers out of the game. Once selection drops to a point, the only morally responsible thing left for the government to do is take control of all the insurance plans, standardize them, and convert our country into a single payer system.
Support it or fight it, I just wish for everyone to know where this battle is ultimately heading.
Readers of this blog know that I can be critical of the representatives of my home state, Iowa. But, this week I'm quite proud of my Senator Chuck Grassley, not for any specific action taken this week, rather for an amendment to a bill he presented years ago during the now infamous Affordable Care Act debate.
The Grassley Amendment in the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) legislation that ensured that the government could not offer members of the House and Senate and their staffs any insurance plans but those created by the bill or those that were part of the exchanges set up in association with it. A simple exercise in practicing what you preach. If Congress, acting at the behest of President Obama, was going to shove this unpopular idea down the throats of an unwilling nation, those involved in making the law were going to have to live with it the same as the rest of the country. Fast forward three years later when there are only six months remaining before this provision goes into effect, it appears a new bipartisan consensus has emerged in Congress, I'll pause here for you to get back up in your chair after being blown away by that little factoid... good? OK. It appears that nobody in Congress wants any part in participating in the nationally mandated program
Though Democrats have berated the House Republicans over more than a few dozen attempts to repeal the act,many in Washington view the impending deadline with horror since the prospect of being forced into ObamaCare insurance has set off a mass exodus of members and their senior staffs who would rather retire and stay grandfathered into their current insurance programs, touted as being very nice, then be submitted to the same type of rules and regulations that you and I are subject to. As Politico reports, there could be a surge in resignations before December 31 among congressional staff since doing so will allow representatives, senators and other congressional employees to retain their old federal insurance plans.
This has led the same Democrats who pushed for the passage of ObamaCare to demand that it be changed to let the inhabitants of Capitol Hill off the hook, one such outspoken person was John Larson of Connecticut who seems quite confident that an arrangement will be made to suit their own specific needs and wants without it effecting anyone else who may want the same considerations. But even though Republicans have just as much incentive to want to amend the bill to save their own members and their staffs, their answer should be no. If Congress doesn't want to cope with the far higher costs and poorer coverage that ObamaCare will ensure, they can scrap the entire bill rather than just adding a single paragraph to the already it to suit their own interests.
If a Democratic like Connecticut’s John Larson, who voted for the legislation probably without reading it, thinks it’s unfair to expect his employees to be put in the same boat as his constituents, then maybe he should rethink the entire measure that he played a pivotal role in passing when his party controlled Congress.
Most Americans, who already think about as much of Congress as a vegan thinks of McDonalds, will shed few tears for the travails of these servants of the masses. Nor will they think the exodus of said members and staff will do the country much harm. But, to be fair, if the kind of turnover really does take place, a void of experienced staffers and veteran politicians could make Capitol Hill an even more dysfunctional place than it already has become. Losing their staffs (who provide much of the expertise and institutional memory of this branch of government) may be a disaster, but Congress must suffer along with the rest of us if they are to retain even a shred of credibility.
The IRS is acting like a rogue agency with little regard for the rule of law, but you already knew that.
What may interest you is that I'm not talking about the targeting of 501(c)4's that have the word tea party, conservative, or 9/12 in their name.
"You must mean the medias scant coverage to its theft of 60 million medical records, now the subject of a class action lawsuit." you say.
"Yup, that's not being covered a whole lot." I reply. "But that's still not what I'm concerned about."
What is scaring me is that the press have been all but silent regarding the highly illegal IRS scheme to fund Obamacare’s federal insurance exchanges.
In states such as my dear sweet Iowa, we are still in the works for creating one of the exchanges to allow people to purchase a healthcare plan as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. Many states are outright refusing to set these state level exchanges up since the Supreme Court ruling that a states medicaid reimbursements from the federal government can not be tied to a states creation of just such an exchange or expansion of medicaid benefits. It's because of this little factoid that a year ago, the IRS finalized a regulatory ruling to the effect that it will issue tax credits through Obamacare’s federal insurance exchanges.
Why is that such a big deal? Well, much like when Spike Lee tries to call a technical at a Knicks game, the IRS has been granted no legal authority, by the Affordable Care Act (PPACA) or any other act of Congress, to issue such credits. In fact, the ruling flouts the explicit language of Obamacare.
The ACA law stipulates that all such assistance must emanate from state-run exchanges. Even if the federal government sets up an exchange in a state that has declined to do so, it wouldn't be authorized to issue tax credits. And because 27 states have refused to set up exchanges, this restriction will cripple Obamacare. Without the ability to dole out tax credits and subsidies in more than half of the states, the Beltway bureaucrats attempting to implement the much-despised “reform” law will be hamstrung.
The estimated tab for this little administrative ruling, according to testimony given to the House ways and means committee by the president of the Tax Foundation, could be in the ballpark of $800 Billion dollars. Or, about $254 a second. Also take a moment to notice the date that this near trillion dollar abuse of power by the IRS was published. A shame that the country was distracted so on that day. Chris Mathews would call this coincidence racist.
This is obviously an unprecedented and dangerous power grab. And it gets worse, this arbitrary IRS rule will allow it to tax employers whom Congress did not authorize the agency to tax. Just as Obamacare stipulates that tax credits can only be issued through state-run exchanges, it also says that employer mandates can only originate from these entities. Therefore, the IRS isn’t legally authorized to fine non-compliant businesses in a state that has refused to set up an exchange.
Yet it clearly intends to do so. As it did with the tax-exempt applications of conservative groups and the confidential medical records of millions of U.S. citizens, the IRS plans on going rogue. Even Jar Jar Binks would hesitate to call in granting this kind of power to a group of unelected bureaucrats. And, because of the harm this feature of the rule will inflict on many businesses, it has generated several lawsuits. The most promising of these was filed last month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by a group of small businesses challenging the rule as an extralegal expansion of Obamacare.
The IRS is one of the most powerful agencies in the unelected and largely unaccountable fourth branch of the U.S. government, otherwise known as the administrative state. Most of the civil servants working in the various monuments to the bureaucracy around the country are honorable and earnest, even in Cincinnati, and in many ways there are some good aspects to Obamacare. This, along with the Tea Party scandal and leaking of medical records is more broadly symptomatic of the fundamental flaws inherent to the modern size and scope of our federal government. Its unyielding desire to have a say in every aspect of our lives comes with an insatiable need for revenue and tax collection enforcement. The result is a supremely powerful IRS. Any entity as large as the IRS will have bad apples. The problem is that the IRS’s authority empowers a bad apple to have a loud booming voice in the way that countless American taxpayers live their daily lives.
Now that I have your attention, it's time for another political rant, but the central players are those lovely mammaries that, much like Saturday morning cartoons, we learned to love as a child and still try and get a peak at from time to time when our wives aren't looking.
As a result of a provision in the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), health insurance plans now have to cover the full cost of breast pumps for nursing mothers. The new rule took effect for many people at the start of 2013. It's led to a boom in the sale of the pumps, a heaving surge in demand, a swelling bottom line, the executives are tickled, and shareholders dividends have been nursed well from the result of the sales of these pumps, which can cost hundreds of dollars.
Advocates of requiring insurance companies to pay for breast pumps say that the measure will pay for itself in the long run. A very scientific looking study found that people who suckle on breasts tend to have fewer health problems. It is not too far fetched say the same may be true for babies, and paying for breast pumps should mean more babies are breast fed. There is, however, another aspect to consider, new moms now seem more likely to splurge on fancy new things for their breasts, including breast pumps. If you purchased the cheapest pump you could buy last year, and this year you can get the most expensive one free, why wouldn't you not only buy another one?
It is in that last statement that this issue takes flight, for it is not you who is forking over the hundreds of dollars, it is everyone. Weird things happen when you take price out of the equation for consumers. For one thing, they stop looking for the best price. But, even though breast pumps are free for new moms, somebody has to pay for them. Health insurance premiums are driven by how much we spend on health care. The more things that are covered by health insurance policies, the more premiums have to rise to cover that spending. This is being proven over and over again as premiums continue to rise at alarming rates in the wake of Obamacare, which had been promised to stifle such increases, yet here we are about 3 years later looking like a group of dumbfounded men staring at, well, you know where I'm going with that.
I have spent many hours researching breasts on the internet, and have concluded that we are going about this issue all wrong, that it is not an issue where we should be concerned about the health of the baby, but about the general well being of our baby momma's. We should hold them close, and comfort them, stroke their hair and see if they smell nice.
The worst part is people will see free and forget that nothing is free. Then about half of the population will see breasts and forget about all the other problems this bill continues to shine a pair of headlights on.
Back in July, I picked up the Sunday edition of a local newspaper, and read a guest column in the opinion section that kind of upset me, it was a piece that tried to justify the need for intervention in healthcare decisions so that families are moved toward "alleviating pain". His insinuation that Doctors and the Medical Industry was needed to be kept in check to defend patients as they faced end of life choices. I was moved to write back and share a bit of my experiences with the death of a close one. Turns out my reply was published in the following Sunday's paper, I never got a copy of the paper, but my letter was published online. I thought I'd share it here as well;
Perhaps I am missing his point, but I felt a sense of dudgeon at his insinuation that our health care system does nothing put perpetuate the misery of being elderly and sick by choosing quantity over quality. The system is not, and should never be, what makes the decisions; the care is not what makes it easier to say goodbye to a loved one.
His most accurate statement was that disease knows no politics, and the hand that feeds the payroll of a health care facility deserves no spot at the table when a family is making these tough decisions.
When my mother passed away last year, it was in the wake of several difficult discussions about quality of life. Many factors and considerations weigh on your soul when determining what is best for a loved one. She was sick, she was not going to get better, and I’m proud to say that my family had the maturity to know when the time for fighting was passed, and the time for saying our goodbyes began.
The question I charge to proponents of creating a committee, medical or not, to assess these decisions: Considering some families need to fight to the end, and some families need to know a loved one leaves us peacefully, but what kind of a system even attempts to shift that power to a third party, away from the family?
--------------------
If you do not know about the IPAB, I strongly suggest you start learning about it, in about 3 years it will be an issue that will be brought up in discussions frequently.
Readers of this blog are probably figuring out that I am waiting in great anticipation for a certain sitting president to present his vision for the next 4 years in something other then grandiose terms. Thus far we have been told that if Romney wins, women will no longer have bridges to drive to Planned Parent because Romney spent all the money exporting paper mills to the Cayman Islands, or something like that. There is no plan for the next four years. We can’t even seem to agree on a tax plan for next year. But, I said early on that this series would be a Pro Romney chain and not a dump on our President, I’ve got plenty of other posts that do that. I do, however, want to help paint the picture of what the next four years may look like under a Romney Presidency.
The Case for Mitt Romney – Part 2: The Romney Plan
First I have to lower some expectations. Day 1: Pulled straight from his television commercial. Romney has stated that he plans to fast track approval for the Keystone XL Pipeline. The sad truth, this is all but impossible now, it’s too late, we missed the boat, and guess who was right there for the rebound, a company by the name CNOOC, a Chinese state owned conglomerate, now has a roughly $15 Billion dollar investment in the Canadian Sands project by buying Nexen. Just another stepping stone is China’s buildup of owning and controlling a disproportionate share of the Worlds high dollar natural resources. What this means is that if it comes down to running pipelines from Canada to the Gulf coast vs. the Pacific coast of Canada, CNOOC is who will be making the decision. We had our window, and we blew it.
His other major task for ‘Day 1’ is repealing Obama Care, or at the least grant executive waivers to all the states. I have spent hours upon hours trying to glean some insight as to what a likely scenario will be in the coming years when it comes to this legislation. All I know for certain is that the process in which we got to this point makes no true sense to me, and I’m sure between now and November I, and a few million other people in the blogosphere, will have plenty to say about the feasibility of any action against Obama Care. It sounds simple enough, but without 60 votes in the senate, which I would declare unlikely, this is probably going to get messier well before it gets better. If some states use waivers and others don’t, if some states opt out of the Medicaid expansions and others don’t, then this law could end up being a cluster of ever changing parts which usually means an even bigger bureaucracy to manage all the different aspects that change state by state.
Wow, convinced yet? Me neither, but here is the good news…
Mitt Romney’s Tax Policy: We are told again, and again, and again, that the US is sitting on a huge pile of cash. Why? In a word, uncertainty. How many times has a fight broken out on capitol hill over taxes? Does Obama Care have taxes? Are we extending the Bush era tax cuts? For who? Payroll tax holidays? New taxes on the wealthy? What about capital gains tax rates? There are so many variables playing into what we will be paying on taxes anywhere from 5 months to 5 years from now. If you are preparing a family budget and are told your paychecks may be shrinking by 0%, 5%, 10%, 15% next year, would you go out and spend money now? Or start making sure your savings account was in good shape. (Hint: The smart answer is the latter one, and I hope most of you are doing this regardless).
So, what is the Romney plan? To stop the insanity! To throw out all these stupid temporary tax plans and put in a new low rate, broad based plan that removes many exemptions and simplifies the code. Without indulging in too many details, people have been comparing this approach to the Reagan Tax plan of cutting rates in 1981, then revamping the entire system in 1986. We could go into ideals of the Laffer curve or the law of diminishing returns, people will say that this will hurt the lower class, but from 1981 to 1987, the era of Reagen Tax cuts, the lowest Quintile (that is to say the bottom 20% of wage earners) effective tax rate went from 0.5% <drum roll please> to -0.6%. That’s negative point six percent, and then continued down to -1.6% by the time Reagan left office in 1989. And under the Bush Tax cuts for the wealthy from 2001 at -5.6%, it continued down to -6.2% by the time 2004 rolled around (Bush tax cuts from 01 and 03 fully implemented). Yet from ’81 to ’89 (Reagan era) total income tax receipts rose 56%, GDP rose prior to the ’09 collapse Bush saw a 15% increase, and that was not tax reform, simply a reduction in the tax rates. Romney’s plan speaks much more to the principals of the former.
A common part of Romney’s Fiscal plan is deficit reduction. Romney speaks very highly of the Paul Ryan budget plan. Although most people openly admit getting that bill passed through congress as is will be daunting, even if major Republican shift occurs this fall. The Romney plan calls for a day one <eek, I put this in the wrong spot!> reduction of discretionary spending of 5%. If you do not believe our current Debt ot GDP ratio is alarming then you probably also believe that denial is just a river in Egypt. Here is a short list of developed countries with more debt than their annual GDP; Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and as of 2011, the US of A has a Debt to GDP ratio of 103%. Not exactly a list of countries reaping the benefits of state investment. The Romney Plan is geared to stop this trend with no cost growth strategy (elimination of ‘Red Tape’), cuts to government spending, and gradual implementation of austerity measures.
Speaking of red tape, that is a line used far too often in politics today. If you have not hear Gov. Romney’s speech to the VFW, I would recommend watching the video, it’s less then 20 minutes and has some good insight to the Romney approach when it comes to cutting the bureaucracy, he tells a tale of navel ship building over the years;
“And while our output has declined, the bureaucracy has increased. There is enormous waste. Let me give you an example: During World War Two, we built 1,000 ships per year with 1,000 people in the Bureau of Ships – the purchasing department, if you will. In the 1980’s we built 17 ships per year, with 4,000 people in purchasing. Today, for 9 ships a year, it takes 25,000 people!
Let me tell you, as a conservative businessman who has spent most of his life in the private sector, I look at that kind of inefficiency and bloat and say, “Let me at it.”
The devil may lie in the details, but this makes sense to me, it has been too long since we have had an honest administrator leading this country. Too many items are passed down the political hierarchy and not enough simple questions asked to justify these figures.
I have spent an unhealthy amount of time looking at the numbers, reading into everyone from Paul Krugman to Thomas Sowell in an attempt to interpret the mountains of data. My personal conclusion, most economists are not stupid, but, you can spin numbers any way you want to support any theory. The real question at hand is not does a plan work on its merits, it is in how well it will be received. Having a fair, simple, low rate set in place for a long term, I believe, would be the best thing for the economy right now. Tax rates skyrocketed in the wake of World War II with little negative impact, why? People wanted to win a war, in the decades that followed, the US has conceded a good sum of it’s share of the global wealth, not necessarily a bad thing at its face, but we cannot count on exclusivity of our economic power to carry up forward, we have to attract business here from other countries and retain and grow our businesses here so they can compete with these global companies. This is a significant shift from our thinking of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s when logistics and communication capacities simply didn’t allow for the level of competition we see today. The Romney tax and regulatory plans acts upon these ideals and creates a business environment that can compete with other developed countries. We took similar steps in the 80’s when Japan emerged as a global competitor and when the USSR was our main competition, now it’s China and the EU. America can compete with the best of them, we have wealth, resources, and ingenuity, we need a set of rules that allows us to utilize these safely, cleanly, and last but not least, practically so that our wealth is not invested else wear, our resources are not exploited, and our ingenuity is not usurped as a result of an uneven playing field.
Next in this Series, Either “The Wisdom in his VP Choice”, or some other topic if he chooses someone stupid like Jan Brewer, or "Nevermind, I'm moving to Canada" if it's Sarah Palin.
In anticipation of a Supreme court decision this week, I dug out an e-mail I sent to my local Congressman back when The America's Health Choices Act (a.k.a. Obama-Care) was being debated. The meat of the letter is below. My major concern was that the "savings" from this Bill not only didn't exist, but left the entire insurance industry with no choice but to convert to a single payer system. In my usual manner, it's littered with hyperlinks and references. Enjoy!
---------------------
What is the Purpose of the Healthcare Reform Act?
"I happen to be a proponent of a single payer "Universal Healthcare system"
~State Senator Obama, 2003
"...But I don't think we'll be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately, there's going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out, 15 years out or 20 years out..."
~Senator Obama, 2007
"...At Least we (Government) can let Doctor's know, and your mom know that you know what, this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the pain killer"
~President Obama 7/25/09
(B) DEPENDENT COVERAGE PERMITTED- Subparagraph (A) shall not affect the subsequent enrollment of a dependent of an individual who is covered as of such first day.
-Section 102 (a) of HR3200 Health Care Reform Bill
That's it, Either you are on a plan before this new bill takes effect, or you are a dependent, otherwise you are NOT exempt from this program. There is no option in the bill to change plans with a new employer, your insurance term expires, etc.
The fundamental principal of insurance is that a larger number of people pool their resources together to spread out costs. The only way this bill can truly lower costs, as the President is constantly stating, is to have as many people of all classes and health included in this system. There is no logical way that this plan can only be imposed on the poor and disproportionately sick and not have to be heavily subsidized by taxpayer money. The Congressional Budget Office says this, and common sense says this.
