Monthly Archives: April 2016

Who Enrolls in Obamacare?

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What’s the effect of that on costs under Obamacare?  The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association rudely conducted a study of the matter, and they found

  • New enrollees in individual health plans in 2014 and 2015 had higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, depression, coronary artery disease, HIV and Hepatitis C than those enrolled before ObamaCare.
  • New enrollees received significantly more medical care, on average, than those with individual or employer-based plans.
  • New enrollees had more inpatient admissions, outpatient visits, prescriptions filled and emergency room visits.
  • Medical costs for new members were, on average, 19% higher than for employer-based members in 2014, and 22% higher last year. Average monthly medical spending for those newly enrolled members also rose at a higher rate in that period.

And

A recent Daily Caller examination of annual reports from insurers also found storm clouds on the horizon of the exchanges.  It found that 8 of the 11 remaining exchanges may fail this year, despite assurances from the Obama administration.

All of which will lead to rising costs.  That increased use of medical care and health coverage plans, paid for with OPM, will drive health plan providers’ costs and so their premiums charged the customer (read: the government/your tax money).  The greatly reduced ObamaMarts will drive costs to the health plan provider customer, since subsidies—OPM—will be lost to them, also.

A report from Freedom Partners earlier this year showed premiums on the individual market are rising by double digits in most states.

Didn’t President Barack Obama (D) promise the contrary?  Both the current Democratic Party Presidential candidates are promising to extend this even further, too.

Elections have consequences.

Maybe It’s the AGs

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…and the activists who should be subject to RICO investigations.

Emails obtained and released by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute show a number of state attorneys general and their staff received advice and guidance from environmental activists at a March 29 meeting in New York, on the same day as a major press conference.

And

Another email chain shows Srolovic and Scott Kline, a Vermont assistant attorney general, even drawing up a Common Interest Agreement, in order to protect as privileged the discussions at the meeting.

Because transparency and honesty are for the little people.

And

[A] January meeting in Manhattan…brought together several veteran environmental activists to discuss how to “establish in [the] public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

Because it’s necessary to prejudice the discussion and the jury pool.  Necessary because these climatistas know they cannot make a scientific, much less even coherent, argument based on actual facts.

Hmm….

An Objective Court

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Can a court that begins hearing a case while spring-loaded to deference in favor of the Legislative (a law is likely Constitutional, or a law should be read in a manner consistent with it being Constitutional) or the Executive (a Department’s or Agency’s Rule is likely proper) actually hear the case impartially?

There’s an interesting symposium recently held by the Institute for Justice’s Center for Judicial Engagement that bears on the matter; the papers presented are about to be published by the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy.  Professor Randy Barnett, head of Georgetown University’s Center for the Constitution, has a (draft) Foreword that’s available now.  That Foreword is titled Why Popular Sovereignty Requires the Due Process of Law to Challenge “Irrational or Arbitrary” Statutes, and it bears directly on the question I asked above.  Below are a couple of dispositive excerpts [emphases in the original] from the Foreword.  As they say, RTWT.

In other words, before sovereign individuals can justly be deprived of their “life” (by capital punishment), “liberty” (by imprisonment), or “property” (by penalty or fine), the “due process of law” entitles them to a judicial evaluation of whether a statute being enforced against them is within the “just powers” of Congress or state legislatures to enact.  And the “due process of law” requires that such a statute be a “law.”

Notice that.  “Due process of law” is not one phrase, it’s two—”due process” and “of law”—each of which must be considered separately in adjudicating the legitimacy of a law.

And the bit about judicial bias in hearing cases—and it’s not Liberal vs Conservative bias:

Crucially, the “due process of law” requires that the magistrate or judge hearing such a challenge be impartial.  If the judge hearing a challenge simply “presumes” that the legislature is acting properly, or “defers” to the legislature’s own assessment of its powers, then that judge is not acting impartially.  Even worse, if the “presumption” in favor of legislation is irrebuttable, then the person dressed in black robes is not acting as a judge at all.

Either the Court and its judges/Justices are objective, impartial, or they are not.  There is no middle ground.

The answer to the question, then, is a resounding No.  There can be no judicial deference.  Every case before a court must be addressed by that court without regard to the claimed—especially without regard to any presumed—authority of either of the other two branches of government, neither of which are in any way superior to the Third Branch.

It’s long past time our courts, and especially our Supreme Court, lost their deference and resumed their place as a coequal branch of our Federal government.  Of course, that will require Justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg (the Constitution is a living document and requires constant judicial reinterpretation to “update” it) and Sonya Sotomayor (the empathetically wise Latina) to be replaced with properly textualist (or originalist, but that takes an increasing skill at mind reading as the origin recedes into the past) judges.

Update: Bad misspelling, bad.  [sigh]

A State Appeals Court Missed the Point

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Recall the California case, Vergara v California, in which nine students and the nonprofit advocacy group Students Matter, sued the State of California, arguing that the State’s tenure laws and its firing and layoff policies made it too hard to fire bad teachers, thereby denying students a decent education.  At trial, the students won, and the laws were struck as unconstitutional.  Naturally, teachers unions—California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers—anxious to protect its tenure perks, appealed.

Last Thursday, a State appellate court

said the plaintiffs had not successfully proven that some students were indeed getting an inferior education because of job protection provisions.

The appellate court wrote, with a straight face,

Although the statutes may lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers than a hypothetical alternative system would, the statutes do not address the assignment of teachers.  Instead, administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach.

What the appellate court carefully ignored is that it doesn’t matter where bad teachers are assigned to teach.  The statutes in question require that they be assigned somewhere, to inflict their incompetence on unfortunate students somewhere.

That was the point of the suit: the statutes…lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers….

Score another victory of union prerogative over the welfare of our children.

No Stone Unturned

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And they’ll regulate how to turn the stones, too [emphasis added].

The European Union could require Internet search engines, such as Alphabet Inc’s Google, to provide more transparency about advertising systems and conditions of use as part of new rules to regulate Web platforms.

Just gotta fill that regulatory vacuum.  Just gotta.  ‘Cos the people can’t be left to their own devices; they can’t handle not being told what to do and not do.

Here’s European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip on the matter:

We have to deal with all those problems, but separately.

Notice that.  We have to deal, not the people should be left to deal.  They’d just be no good at it.  Besides, the more…targeted…the more regulations the Regulatory State gets to write.