Tag Archives: markets

Losing Health Coverage

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The CBO and Progressive-Democrats in Congress loudly claim that millions will lose their health coverage plans under Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare.

What the Progressive-Democrats are carefully ignoring (the CBO not so much; they weren’t tasked with comparing the Republican plans and Obamacare) are the real millions that already are losing or are about to lose their health coverage plans because Obamacare is collapsing now.

The nation’s second largest health insurance company, Anthem, will extract itself from the majority of the ObamaCare market in the state of Ohio by 2018, the company announced Tuesday, raising questions about the future of its exchange participation.

And

The decision could leave 20 counties within the state without access to coverage under the Affordable Care Act[.]

Anthem is considering leaving Obamacare altogether in the not-too-distant future.

Anthem handles over a million customers in the health coverage market, now considerably fewer under Obamacare, and perhaps shortly none at all.  Nor is Anthem alone in being unable to continue under Obamacare.  Aetna and Humana will be leaving next year, and those customers will be losing their coverage.

Those people actually, not speculatively, are losing their coverage.

Hollywood, Too

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A month into the summer movie season and the box office is already suffering from poor performances by a number of widely panned films.

Box office gross receipts are off nearly 5% through the summer compared to the same period last year and its this-year Memorial Day weekend wasn’t this bad since 1999.

Megan Colligan, Paramount’s President of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution on her studio’s Baywatch:

The cast could not have done more work in aggressively promoting “Baywatch.” Dwayne [Johnson] gave this 150%[.]

It is to weep.  They tried so hard—where’s their participation ribbon?

It couldn’t possibly be that they’re making bad movies, or movies on a theme that’s already played out, or….  Mm, mm.  Couldn’t be.  Gotta be somebody else’s fault.

But it’s expectable.  They’re of a piece.

Medicaid Transfers

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It’s well understood that Medicaid badly wants reform.  My own view is to give it back to the States by reducing Federal fund transfers to them until the transfers are zero, which also would eliminate Federal strings jerking the States to do everything the same way, the Federal way.

There are lots of paths to that end, and there are a number of other reforms that would help the situation at least a little.  The House plan for repeal and replace of Obamacare, the first step of which was the American Health Care Act, has one such step, the repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

Expanding State participation in Federally provided—with those strings attached—funds—expanding Medicaid—as a number State governors have done, is not one of those reforms.  Not even for Republican governors.

Sixteen GOP governors represent states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and they are generally loath to see the program cut back.

Nobody forced these persons to mainline the Federal funds drug. They stuck that needle in their veins and addicted themselves, with no outside pressure at all.

These guys are badly mistaken, and they’ve only made things worse for the constituents for whom they claim to work.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, one of those 16, thinks the expansion is just peachy keen; he’s still riding the high from his needle.  He says that “600,000 Michiganders have gained coverage and the state’s hospitals have saved about $300 million.”

What he’s carefully ignoring, though, is how much money Michiganders and those hospitals sent to the Federal government in various taxes and fees to contribute to 49 other States’ Medicaid program participation.  How many of those Michiganders could have been helped and how much money could Michigan’s hospitals have saved had the State kept those monies, instead?  How much would those Michigan citizens and those Michigan hospitals have benefited, had they been able to keep their money—their money, not the State or Federal government’s money—instead of paying all those taxes and fees to the Federal government?

Hindsight

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…and learning from it for better anticipations.

Federal Reserve officials grappling with the legacy of expansive stimulus would find it difficult to return to the central bank’s precrisis role on the sidelines of financial markets, analysts and central-bank watchers say.

Well, NSS.  Frankly, these worthies should have known the outcomes likely from their intervention before they intervened.

Aside from the magnitude of the necessary rollback and its attendant difficulty—the Fed’s balance sheet has expanded four and a half times, from $1 trillion to $4.5 trillion since right before the Panic of 2008—there’s the human engineering aspect of personal political power:

The Fed has become “like an octopus,” said Jeffrey Cleveland, chief economist at Payden & Rygel, a Los Angeles money manager.  “Once you get the power and you are influencing all these markets, do you really want to retreat from all that?”

Well,…

New York Fed President William Dudley told an audience this month the portfolio isn’t likely to return to its precrisis size. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams said this month the portfolio would be “significantly smaller” than it is today, but likely above $2 trillion in assets.

Still twice the original size of the Fed’s balance sheet.  Oops.

Now the rationalization, summarized in the subheadline of the article at the link:

Pulling out of newest central-bank innovations risks market disruptions

A definite possibility, but there’s not much concern for the underlying economy in that remark.  And the economy is what’s important.

We’ll see whether these guys are worth their taxpayer-funded paychecks by how well they learn from hindsight and their mistake.  It doesn’t look promising.

Yet Another

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…Alinsky-esque distraction by the Ctl-Left.  This one is on the matter of Obamacare subsidies to health coverage providers to compensate them “for reducing out-of-pocket costs for some low-income consumers who sign up for plans on the exchanges.”

The Obama administration paid billions of our tax dollars to these providers, the amount for this year alone looks to be in the neighborhood of $7 billion, with the annual payout looking to rise to $16 billion in 10 years.

The House has sued to block further payments because no funds were appropriated for them, and so they’re illegal.  A number of State AGs are seeking to intervene in the suit.

More than a dozen Democratic state attorneys general took legal action Thursday seeking to preserve billions of dollars in federal subsidy payments….

It’s a fair debate to have in the courts, although, absent appropriation, there’s no money to spend, and so it would seem illegal to spend.

Now comes the cynical distraction.  New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said,

Millions of families across the country—including hundreds of thousands right here in New York—rely on these subsidies for their basic health care[.]

As if that’s relevant to the legality of the matter.  The courts should allow the spending independently of the law because tear-jerking.

Schneiderman is demonstrating the intellectual, legal, and moral bankruptcy of the Ctl-Left’s demands.  They’re wholly unable to present a case, and so they stoop to emotionalism.