Daily Archives: 2 September 2014

Good, and Bad

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The 6th Circuit, in a case involving an assault on an Amish man by various members of his community because he didn’t conform to their standards, came to the right answer, but then it did the wrong thing with its answer.

The assaulters were convicted of their assault, with the crime and the conviction treated by the prosecutor and the trial court as a hate crime. The Circuit Court ruled, though,

Personal conflict, not religion, was the driving motive behind beard- and hair-cutting attacks targeting Amish, an appeals court panel ruled Wednesday in overturning the hate-crime convictions of 16 men and women.

This is good, because our crimes don’t need to be gussied up with froo-froo, and adding “hate” to the definition of a crime in order to create a new crime is such froo-froo. When we criminalize hate, we criminalize the contents of a man’s mind—and that’s no thing a government should be involved with. Full stop. All that needs criminalization—if anything—is the actual deed done. Our thoughts must be beyond government’s reach, no matter the good intentions in trying to go that far.

But the ruling is bad because it overturned the convictions altogether, rather than remanding the case for resentencing. That the men were convicted of a crime with a motivation means the men were convicted of a crime.

Now the victims must consider reliving those events in a new trial, and that’s also bad.

The 6th Circuit’s opinion can be read here.

Obamacare and ObamaMart Strike Again

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In the continuing story of ObamaMart’s still incomplete (!) backend, the part of the Web site that takes the citizen’s input and sorts it, collates it with other government information, and then passes it on to other relevant parties—the health plan providers, for instance, and the IRS—there’s this:

Because of complicated connections between the new health care law and income taxes, the Department of Health and Human Services must send out millions of new tax forms next year.

The forms are called 1095-As, and list who in each household has health coverage, and how much the government paid each month to subsidize those insurance premiums. Nearly 5 million people have gotten subsidies through HealthCare.gov.

If the forms are delayed past their Jan 31 deadline, some people may have to wait to file tax returns—and collect their refunds.

A delay of a week or two may not sound like much, but many people depend on their tax refunds to plug holes in family finances.

That folks should better plan their withholding (where possible) and not extend Uncle Sugar a year-long interest-free loan is a separate story. Such planning is typical, and the folks who do this the most are the poorest among us—the very folks President Barack Obama and his ilk claim to be trying to help.

And there’s the coming collapse of employer-provided health plans.

Analysts predict that as ObamaCare takes hold, it will mean the end of employer-provided insurance….

The Wall Street research firm S&P IQ went even further, predicting 90% of such plans will disappear.

Now, I don’t see such an eventuality as necessarily a bad thing. Employer-supplied health plans should be what employer-supplied insurance plans used to be, when the practice began: a matter of employment compensation negotiation between employer and (prospective) employee. What interests me here is the hypocrisy of the thing.

President Barack Obama promised, repeatedly, that

you can keep your plan and your doctor, no matter what[.]

If you lose your employer-supplied health plan, you lose with that “your plan and your doctor” bit. Which, of course, Obama knew at the time he was making those promises. He even bragged about it to then Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the infamous health summit.

Also, when Presidential Candidate Barack Obama was debating Presidential Candidate John McCain in 2008, he decried McCain’s health insurance industry reform proposal as being destructive of employer-supplied health insurance.

[T]his would lead to the unraveling of the employer-based health care system. That, I don’t think, is the kind of change that we need.

Hmm….