Four Months On

Posted on 4 February 2014 by eehines

…and ObamaMart isn’t even letting its victims customers get ObamaMart’s errors corrected.

Now it’s a variant on Catch 22: first ObamaMart hits its customers with errors, then it can’t—or won’t—allow customers (22,000 of them) to correct those errors. Those errors, so far, fall into three main categories. They

charge too much for health insurance (quite apart from the fundamentally higher premiums compared to the canceled plans)
steer customers to the wrong insurance plan (quite apart from shunting them into Medicaid for which they’re not actually eligible)

This is a preview of Four Months On. Read the full post (437 words, estimated 1:45 mins reading time)

Tapering

Posted on 27 January 2014 by eehines

It seems the Fed is serious this time about starting tapering from its QEx foolishness—they’ve begun—and serious about continuing it—Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, in his last FOMC meeting as Chairman, is unlikely to stop the taper, and incoming chairwoman Janet Yellen seems in no position to stop it. And that’s generating some results.

[N]ow that the Fed seems set on drawing down the QE era, investors are hedging their bets and returning to dollar and euro assets.

This is a preview of Tapering. Read the full post (271 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

More Obamacare Dishonesty

Posted on 24 January 2014 by eehines

It’s gotten so blatant that now they’re not even trying to disguise it.

What the Obama administration said publicly:

Per John Goodman:

Week after week, month after month, the Obama administration kept telling us everything’s working fine, there’s no problem and then they turn on a dime and fire their contractor.

President Barack Obama himself, through his Press Secretary, Jay Carney:

I didn’t see the article [containing statements to CGI's replacement contractor on the ObamaMart re-do] I’m not aware of those statements[.]

What HHS said in its no-bid (!) contract request to Accenture, who’s replacing CGI on the ObamaMart Web development/fix:

This is a preview of More Obamacare Dishonesty. Read the full post (278 words, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)

Hotel ObamaMart

Posted on 22 January 2014 by eehines

You can check in, but they do everything they can to keep you from checking out.

A Missouri citizen had her preferred insurance coverage canceled out from under her by Obamacare. She was forced by circumstance into the ObamaMart, where she got coverage for $950/mo (that’s $11,400 each and every year, for those of you following along at home).

After that, she found a better plan with coverage that better suited her needs on what’s left of the private market, and she tried to sign up. No dice; the insurer told her she’d have to cancel her Obamacare policy first (not allowed to buy two policies from two different stores, apparently).

This is a preview of Hotel ObamaMart. Read the full post (337 words, estimated 1:21 mins reading time)

A Lawless Law

Posted on 20 January 2014 by eehines

President Barack Obama is at it again. Now he’s unilaterally, without legal authority, delaying another aspect of Obamacare. He’s having his IRS—his Un-American Activities Committee (at least the members of HUAC were elected by us)—not enforce through tax collections a provision that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than to other employees. His excuse is that, four years after Obamacare was enacted, the IRS hasn’t bothered to write the rules that would effect the collections.

This is a preview of A Lawless Law. Read the full post (379 words, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)

Obamacare Runaround, State Level

Posted on 17 January 2014 by eehines

A Maryland woman is getting the Obamacare runaround treatment in Maryland’s state “exchange” (exchange of what, exactly?). The woman, after months of trying, finally got signed up—she thought—through one of Obamacare’s Navigators and was given a confirmation number and a printout of her selected plan.

Her Democrat Representative, Barbara Mikulski, has declined to help (help with what? The woman is signed up, isn’t she? See below); Mikulski would only commit to empty words of…commiseration:

This is a preview of Obamacare Runaround, State Level. Read the full post (284 words, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

Security of Personal Information is an Administrative Burden on Government

Posted on 13 January 2014 by eehines

That’s what the Obama administration claims, and they’re actually serious.

The House of Representatives last Friday passed and sent to the Senate the Health Exchange Security and Transparency Act, HR 3811, by 291-122, with 67 (!) Democrats voting in the affirmative, also.

The one-sentence bill says that no later than two business days after any security breach on an ObamaCare site is discovered, “the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide notice of such breach to each individual.”

In response to that one sentence bill (who says we need 2,000 pages to write a bill?), the Obama administration, through its OMB, issued a one-page statement decrying the bill, saying, in part,

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Filibusters and the Senate

Posted on 13 January 2014 by eehines

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) blew up the Senate filibuster with his manufactured claim of Republican obstructionism and with his Senate rules-breaking move to eliminate it (for now only regarding Presidential nominees) with a (Democrat only) majority vote.

Yet Republican-led (note that: not the Republican satrapy, as Reid views his Senate to be for Democrats) House passed 200 jobs- and economy-related bills in 2013 and some dozen that were passed with 250 or more votes—i.e., with considerable Democrat (that would be bipartisan, for those Progressives following along at home) voting support.

This is a preview of Filibusters and the Senate. Read the full post (256 words, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

A Thought on Income Inequality

Posted on 9 January 2014 by eehines

Inequality in incomes and in accumulated material prosperity are the inevitable outcomes of our inalienable right to equality of opportunity, as exercised through our differing endowments of talents, skills, work ethic, and luck.

The well off—including those best off—use their gains from those inequalities in a variety of ways. Some of these ways are purely personal: luxuries and luxuries for their families. Some of those ways also include support for what are often termed, loosely, “the arts,” and other cultural supports and advancements. It is from these, and not from government, for instance, that support for museums of all sorts come, support for many artists originates, support for invention ideation and development begins.

This is a preview of A Thought on Income Inequality. Read the full post (832 words, estimated 3:20 mins reading time)

Obamacare and Health Spending

Posted on 9 January 2014 by eehines

John Goodman, over at NCPA, has an interesting point-out on Obamacare (and on a Paul Krugman New York Times column, but that’s neither here nor there).* OK, a little bit of here: Goodman cited Krugman as claiming that

Since 2010, when the [the Affordable Care Act] was passed, real health spending per capita—that is, total spending adjusted for overall inflation and population growth—has risen less than a third as rapidly as its long-term average. Real spending per Medicare recipient hasn’t risen at all; real spending per Medicaid beneficiary has actually fallen slightly.

Then Goodman presented this chart

This is a preview of Obamacare and Health Spending. Read the full post (349 words, 1 image, estimated 1:24 mins reading time)

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