Daily Archives: 6 January 2014

Health Law’s Uneasy Launch

Posted on by
Reply

In a Wall Street Journal article from which I copied the title, Christopher Weaver opened with some misapprehensions that are interesting for a WSJ article [emphasis added].

Can [the Health Law’s] mix of government subsidies and market-based competition extend health insurance to millions of people…?

Umm, what market-based competition, exactly?  The Health Law begins with a mandate that creates artificial demand.  The underpinning and beginning of this particular market is decidedly anti-competitive.  The Health Law continues and ends with mandated coverages—innovation not allowed except by government permission—and with government-permitted premiums.  There’s no competition present in the product mix, either.

Oh, and those premiums are not at all based on the risk being assumed; indeed, health histories of the enrollees are explicitly excluded from the premiums charged them.

There’s nothing at all competition-based in this privately funded, government mandated welfare entitlement program.

Another Battle

Posted on by
Reply

…in the Progressive war on women.

Here’s it’s the Obama administration’s response to Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s injunction staying Obama’s  contraceptive mandate as it applies to the Little Sisters of the Poor and their nursing home/hospice in Colorado.  Sotomayor, in issuing her injunction, had ordered the Obama administration to respond by last Friday morning with their argument for why the injunction should be lifted.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s response boiled down to the Little Sisters have no legal claim: they aren’t harmed by authorizing contraceptives to be covered by an insurer in their name because they aren’t offering the coverage directly.  Verrilli went on:

…are not required to offer group health plans in the first place.  [They can make a] “choice” between two legal options: provide a group health plan or risk payment of the tax.

As The Wall Street Journal put it,

This case is simply a raw assertion of state power directing the religious to follow orders.  Thus ObamaCare forces women who have taken a vow of chastity and minister for the dying to implicate themselves in what they consider to be grave moral wrongs.