Monthly Archives: January 2014

YGTBSM

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Here’s another installment in this series, this time (again) with ObamaMart.

Finally get enrolled in an Obamacare health welfare package via ObamaMart?  Don’t die this year.  Don’t take that raise.  Put that baby back where it came from.  You can’t update your package to account for these life changes—that functionality deliberately was put on the back burner in favor of fixing other…glitches…in the Web site.

The list of life changes that you can’t tell ObamaMart about include, in addition to the above,

  • marriage and divorce
  • death in the family
  • new job
  • moving to a different community

Remember, moving to a different community also changes the premiums you have to pay—that community rating thing.

Remember, also, you still have to repay the subsidy payments you received after the raise made you ineligible.  And you still owe the taxes on the raise.

Just be sure, after you’ve separately told your Plan provider about your life change, you go back and tell ObamaMart.  After they get around to fixing this.

Emergency Unemployment Insurance Extension

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The existence of unemployment insurance payments means, especially for the low-skilled, that the change in income for taking a job ranges from slightly negative to slightly positive.  This is what underlies much of the argument against unemployment insurance payments of any duration.

That’s only background to the present situation, though.  There are two more, and more important, considerations surrounding the present push by President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) to extend emergency unemployment insurance payments.

One is these Democrats’ refusal to allow job training requirements to be attached to any such emergency unemployment insurance payment extension.  This criterion would cull those who are just using the payments to live on.  See the work requirement attachments and their results during/after the Clinton years.  Seethe work requirement attached to TANF when it replaced AFDC.  But the work training requirement has an additional direct benefit.  The training will help these low-skilled workers get better jobs, not just return, of necessity, to the same type of job.

One is these Democrats’ refusal to pay for this extension with spending cuts anywhere else, but only with continued borrowing: this is an emergency, and “we’ve never paid for emergencies.”  Actually, we do pay for emergencies, if only by borrowing against our children’s and their children’s futures.  Which we’ve already done, to the tune of $17+ trillion.  And this sort of unending wealth redistribution is exactly the sort of thing against which Madison warned us in the 3rd Congress.

Which brings up a third consideration.  This “emergency” has been going on for five years.  The demand to extend emergency unemployment insurance payments in this emergency situation is a clear admission that the economic policies of Obama and his Senate cronies are a dismal failure, even if none of them have the integrity or courage to say so out loud.

Plainly, this is just crassly naked vote pandering and an attempt to distract honest Americans from the disaster of Obamacare and Obama’s failed economic and jobs policies.  And from his failed, retreat-oriented foreign “policies.”

It’s also insulting to honest Americans.

Expectations of Privacy

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That we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in our personal effects as we cross foreign borders into foreign countries, and in the crossing process are subject to that country’s laws, is well understood.

Should that lack of expectation in those foreign countries matter, though, concerning our expectation of privacy as we cross our own country’s borders re-entering home from a trip abroad?

In a quasi-related expectations matter, our courts have already ruled, in a mind-reading tour de force, that we must have no such expectation when our private matters are given up to third parties.  These rulings come despite the plethora of privacy protection laws that require those third parties to safeguard our personal matters, and they come while ignoring the enormous hue and cry that ensues a third party’s perceived misuse of our personal matters, even when that (mis)use is narrowly legal—which plainly demonstrates that we do indeed have such an expectation.

One Federal District Judge, Edward Korman of the Eastern District of New York, has ruled that we have no legitimate expectation of privacy on crossing our own border pursuant to coming home.  In a case involving the search of the laptop of an American citizen and journalist (a news photographer, specifically), Korman decided that it’s jake for US border agents have the authority to search laptop computers without reasonable suspicion—just the bald fact that an American is coming home.  Korman’s ruling held, among other things, that

[plaintiff] cannot be so naive to expect that when he crosses the Syrian or Lebanese border that the contents of his computer will be immune from searches and seizures at the whim of those who work for Bashar al-Assad or Hassan Nasrallah.

This application of foreign law as a reason to abrogate an American citizen’s rights domestically, is of a piece with other judges’ rulings that Sharia Law applies in American courts, even to the point of justifying spousal rape (it took an appellate court to overturn this travesty).

Compounding this…opinion…is the further fact that Korman used this excuse to dismiss the citizen/journalist’s lawsuit over the search because he had no standing, having suffered no harm: he had not privacy to invade, and so there was no foul committed.

Korman’s opinion can be seen here.

General Insurance Dysfunction

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I’ve written about the failure and the dishonesty of Obamacare on a number of occasions.  However, the failures of insurance coverage aren’t limited to Obamacare.  Here’s an example from my wife’s insurance coverage, an old-style policy that hasn’t (yet) been canceled by Obamacare.

At my wife’s annual physical, last month, she spent over an hour talking with our doctor about mutual concerns, where they agree, where they disagree. (How many doctors will do that, in the first place?  This is one of the reasons I like her for my doctor, too.)

We got the billing statement a couple days ago:

Billed to Insurance = $20.00
Network Discount = $17.00
Applied to Deductible = $0.00
Paid by Plan = $2.70
Paid at Visit = $0.00
Amount you may Owe = $0.30

First, the insurance networks to which she belongs beat her up to a $20/hr rate that she’s allowed to charge (actually, it’s a per visit rate, but this is what this doctor’s integrity works that out to), then forced an 85% discount on top of that onto her.

Where’s insurance industry competition?  Obamacare ain’t it, and yet it’s worse than the insurance régime before.

Health Law’s Uneasy Launch

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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.