Montreal-based CGI Group Inc, the company that received a $74 million contract to develop and maintain the Hawaii Health Connector web portal, will be awarded another year-long state maintenance contract despite the ongoing problems with the site.
The money comes from a $204 million federal contract the state received in 2012 to set up the Obamacare network in the islands.
This is the same crowd that had so much fun with the ObamaMart failure in 2013.
Hmm….
Doug Erwin, an Economics Professor at Dartmouth, writing in The Wall Street Journal, had a thought.
Restoring trade ties and expanding commerce would revolutionize the Cuban economy and transform Cuban society. It would spur the growth of a business class, creating competing pockets of power and new, wealthy groups that would challenge the ruling Communist Party. It would give Cuban citizens access to more information, and information about the outside world destabilizes any repressive regime. What would happen if every Cuban citizen had access to a smartphone, could organize protests via Twitter, and spread the word about government outrages?
That may well be true. It certainly comports with my view that conservatism and free market philosophies have nothing to fear in the market competition of ideas, and there certainly needs to be such a free market in Cuba.
But there need be no normalization of relations with Cuba, which in the end would benefit only and exclusively the Castros and their successors in the regime, to achieve this. All that’s required is to allow—to legalize from our side of the strait—market interactions between Cuban citizens and American businesses. True enough, the Castro tyranny would object to such a move. However, a black market is the free market alternative to centrally planned economies and to the “economy” of despots.
It’s certainly true that black market pricing is higher than legal free market pricing, but they thrive in a despotic environment for two reasons. One is that those higher than legal free market prices still are lower than the government’s prices. The other is that the products being bought and sold are available at all, as they often are not (e.g., smartphones) in a despot’s economy.
Here is the interaction, and here is the ultimate downfall of the Castro régimes of the world. Then can occur normalization of government-government relations.
h/t Cafe Hayek
Sony made a movie about two journalists scoring an interview with northern Korea’s Bébé Doc, Kim Jong-un, the CIA convincing the journalists to assassinate Kim, and the comedic aspects of such a thing.
This offended Baby Kim and his sycophants, and they threatened mayhem against Sony’s executives and those US movie theaters with the temerity to show the movie.
Rather than letting us Americans make up our own minds about whether to go see the movie, rather than letting movie theater managers determine for themselves whether to show the movie (some had), those threatened Sony executives collapsed like yesterday’s tissue and made the executive decision to not release the movie at all.
This decision can’t even be masqueraded as empathizing with our enemies.
This abject, craven surrender by Sony executives can only encourage terrorists: make threats, get their way. This abject, craven surrender by Sony executives has exposed American companies and American citizens to further terrorist extortion and mayhem.
Way to go, Sony. I’ve lost interest in any more of your movies.
Technologies that can’t compete in the market place aren’t ready for market, nor are they ready for our consumption. Subsidizing these not-ready techs is one way of plusing them up. Another way is to penalize their competition for being too successful.
The New York Times tells this tale, albeit carefully buried in the nether regions of Katharine Seelye’s article. Overarching all of this is this:
New England [Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont] already pays the highest electricity rates of any region in the 48 contiguous states because it has no fossil fuels of its own and has to import all of its oil, gas, and coal.
That’s not strictly true; the Marcellus Shale holds more natural gas than you can shake a…drill…at, and a significant fraction of that lies under western New York. New York, though, is throwing every road block they can think of in the way of extracting the natural gas, which would give the Northeast a nearby, if not local, source of natural gas.
There are two items of interest that backdrop this. One is the spiking energy prices in the Northeast. For instance,
[f]or October, [a small business owner] had paid $376. For November, with virtually no change in his volume of work and without having turned up the thermostat in his two-room shop, his bill came to $788, a staggering increase of 110%.
The other is the lack of infrastructure: there are all of five pipeline systems in the region, with seven new systems proposed.
The six states’ governors had agreed to a regional solution to this, involving building those additional pipelines.
However.
Just last August,
the Massachusetts Legislature rejected the plan, saying in part that cheap energy would flood the market and thwart attempts to advance wind and solar projects. That halted the whole effort.
That halted the whole effort.
But, it’s OK. Progressives and “environmentalists” have your back. And they have sharpened their knives.
h/t Power Line
If you liked your doctor, you could keep your doctor. Maybe. If you were lucky, and your Obamacare Plan still had him on its cut-rate, cut-service list of acceptable (to the government) doctors.
Or, if you like the hospital that now employs him (which doesn’t guarantee you get to see him; the hospital will make that decision). After all, the government’s Obamacare
architects believe that doctors, to better bear financial risk, need to be part of larger, and presumably better-capitalized institutions.
Because, of course, these Progressive Democrats know better than doctors how to provide medical care, know better than you stupid voters how to choose doctors, and know better than either of you how to conduct the business side of any doctor-patient relationship.
In addition to that bit of Gruber-esque dishonesty and dark transparency, Scott Gottlieb, at the above link pointed out this consequence:
Local competition between providers, who vie to contract with health plans, is largely eliminated by these consolidated health systems. Since all health care is local, the lack of competition will soon make it much harder to implement a market-based alternative to ObamaCare. The resulting medical monopolies will make more regulation the most obvious solution to the inevitable cost and quality problems.
This is not at all an unintended consequence. Aside from Democrat disdain for free markets and competition, it’s long been an open goal of the Democratic Party to move our health coverage and our health provision industries into a one, linked, single-payer program—carefully run by government for our benefit, of course.
Start queueing up things to be remembered in 2016: the Democratic Party needs to be swept into history’s dustbin so this damage, among all of their other damage to our country’s weal and global standing, can be repaired.
The sweeping also should be presented as a warning to the Republican Party.