Tag Archives: markets

Congress Has 12 Days

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There are 12 days left after their 5 September return from vacation, driven by the Obamacare requirement for health plan providers to commit by 17 September to selling their health plans for the next year or withdrawing, for Congress to pass a potful of legislation.

Two proposals regarding Obamacare are in the offing.  One would shore up the funds transfer of Federal dollars to those providers who are losing money in ObamaMart, and the other instead would send that money as grants to the States to help them generate their own health coverage plan programs.  This one also would eliminate the Individual Mandate.

Also looming is the debt funding deadline that necessitates raising the debt ceiling to pay currently committed-to bills.

Also: an immigration bill that rationalizes our immigration policy is in conference.  It severely restricts green card issuance (which is foolish IMNSHO), but it has the beneficial effect of that rationalization.

Also: an infrastructure restoral bill is under construction.

Also: bills to withdraw counterproductive, if not outright mendacious, Federal rules and rulings in the EPA, DoEd, Labor, etc that were intended to destroy whole industries (can you say, “coal,” boys and girls?), cancel rule of law on campuses, much too excessively favor unions over management (NLRB), and on and on.

Twelve days of Christmas?  Or is the Grinch coming? [/snark]  Not all of those necessaries have that 12-day deadline, but all of them need to be done quickly, since Congressmen—of both parties and in both houses of Congress—are too (how to put this delicately) chicken to do anything substantive in an election year.  Even were they around in DC doing their jobs instead of hiding out on their various campaign trails.

Obamacare and Drug Abuse

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From a Wall Street Journal op-ed, come a couple of very telling statistics regarding the opioid addiction epidemic.

…overdose deaths per million residents rose twice as fast in the 29 Medicaid expansion states—those that increased eligibility to 138% from 100% of the poverty line—than in the 21 non-expansion states between 2013 and 2015.

And

There were also marked disparities between neighboring states based on whether they opted into ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Deaths increased twice as much in New Hampshire (108%) and Maryland (44%)—expansion states—than in Maine (55%) and Virginia (22%). Drug fatalities shot up by 41% in Ohio while climbing 3% in non-expansion Wisconsin.

This also reflects…interestingly…on those Republican Representatives and Senators who chose to vote against rolling back the Medicaid expansion part of Obamacare.

We’ll See

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In an unprecedented move against North Korea, China on Monday issued an order to carry out the United Nations sanctions imposed on the rogue regime earlier this month.

Of course, in the days immediately following the first meeting between President Donald Trump and the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, just after Trump’s inauguration, the PRC acted like it was going to start honoring then-existing sanctions against northern Korea.

That turned out to be just an act.  Is the present “order” serious, or is it just another empty gesture?

We’ll see, indeed.

Rule of Law

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The DC Circuit Court stacked by President Barack Obama (D) seems to be iffy on the thing.  In an appeal concerning whether the monies the Federal government pays to health care plan providers as subsidies so the plan providers will hold down premiums and deductibles can actually be paid—the funds never were appropriated by Congress, so the payments aren’t legitimate, ruled the trial court—the Circuit Court ruled in part:

The States have shown a substantial risk that an injunction requiring termination of the payments at issue here…would lead directly and imminently to an increase in insurance prices, which in turn will increase the number of uninsured individuals for whom the States will have to provide health care[.]

That may well be true, and if true, it would be unfortunate.

However.

The law is clear: monies not actually appropriated by Congress cannot be spent by the Federal government—the money, in a very real legal sense, does not exist.  It’s also illegal to take funds from other, actually extant, appropriations to spend on non-appropriated-for activities.

The decisions whether to appropriate, and then to spend, are solely political decisions, and judges cannot—may not under our Constitution—decide in any way other than what the law actually says; in particular, they don’t get to rule in accordance with what they wish the law to say.  Doing the latter is nothing other than judge-made law.

In this case, the appellate court plainly has chosen rule by men—via judge-made law, here—over rule of law.

A Bit More on Health Care Coverage

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Senator Susan Collins (R, ME) is worried about health care plan availability to our poor, which she thinks would be endangered were President Donald Trump to act on his thoughts regarding cutting off the funds the Feds pay to health coverage plan providers to get them to charge (artificially) lower deductibles and copays from the poor.

It really would be detrimental to some of the most vulnerable citizens if those payments were cut off. They’re paid to the insurance companies, but the people that they benefit are people who make between 100% and 250% of the poverty rate.

Couple things about this. One is that folks making more than the poverty rate…aren’t poverty-stricken.

The other is that, if the money really is intended to help folks pay for health care coverage plans, the money should go directly to those folks and not to the insurance companies. That way there would be no loss to internal friction in the middlemen of health care plan providers—a friction loss extant even in the most honest and well-intended of providers.

And one more: these aren’t insurance companies selling insurance policies.  It isn’t insurance when risks are transferred by Government fiat and at fees that bear no relation to the risks being transferred.

Collins knows these things full well.