Category Archives: markets

Program Design

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This begins with an objective, cold-eyed analysis of the requirements of the program—which means no a priori assumptions can be made.  Even the most blatantly obvious underlying premises must be questioned and tested.

For instance.

The architects and designers of Obamacare (I’m being generous with those terms, but let’s go with them and see where we wind up) assumed, without checking, the following:

  • just about everyone wants health insurance
  • health insurance will make people healthier
  • those with health insurance are more likely to seek care from physicians and less likely to go to emergency rooms

Michael Barone, in the WSJ article at the link above, provided some data on the legitimacy of those unchecked assumptions.

  • a McKinsey & Co survey of those believed eligible for ObamaCare health-care exchange Plans found all of 11% of those who bought new these last couple of months were previously uninsured
  • two small insurance companies reported that only 25%-35% of those purchasing were previously uninsured

On those other two…assumptions…Barone described an in situ State of Oregon randomized experiment (in function, if not in intent) in the form of a lottery for allocating scarce Medicaid funds to applicants.

  • after two years of Oregon’s lottery, there was no significant difference between Medicaid-insured and uninsured in blood-sugar level, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels
  • those with Medicaid plans were 40% more likely to go to emergency rooms than those without insurance

Where were the Obamacare program architects and designers?

Four Months On

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…and ObamaMart isn’t even letting its victims customers get ObamaMart’s errors corrected.

Now it’s a variant on Catch 22: first ObamaMart hits its customers with errors, then it can’t—or won’t—allow customers (22,000 of them) to correct those errors.  Those errors, so far, fall into three main categories.  They

  • charge too much for health insurance (quite apart from the fundamentally higher premiums compared to the canceled plans)
  • steer customers to the wrong insurance plan (quite apart from shunting them into Medicaid for which they’re not actually eligible)
  • deny customers coverage altogether (the ultimate insult: get the plan with which you were satisfied canceled by Obamacare, and then be told you’re not even eligible for Obamacare, the law that covers everybody)

Yet there is no mechanism in ObamaMart for dealing with these errors or correcting them.  Even when customers mail in their corrections, those just get scanned in and fed to the same computer systems that don’t work for the customers directly.  The backend that would allow Customer “Service” personnel to access those scanned-in customer-originated corrections in order to work them hasn’t been built.

ObamaMart’s workaround for one unlucky woman on a $22k per year salary whose erroneous Obamacare Plan is costing her $100/mo more on her premiums than she should be charged and a $4k higher deductible than she should be getting charged?  Pay up.  We’ll correct this later.  Promise.

Notice that those overcharges alone come to nearly a quarter of her annual income.  She’s supposed to pay an additional 25% of her annual income for ObamaMart’s error, and hope that, someday, she’ll get the right plan and her money back.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the HHS agency responsible for ObamaMart and for administering the Obamacare law, doesn’t care about this failure, either.  According to The Washington Post (the above link) [emphasis added],

Three knowledgeable individuals, speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions, said it is unclear when the appeals process will become available.  So far, it is not among the top priorities for completing parts of the federal insurance exchange’s computer system that still do not work.

And that’s just Obama’s store.  Obama’s law is even more unworkable, expensive, and disastrous, as we’ve also been seeing, with the millions of health policy cancelations over these same last four months.  As the “glitches” continue to get fixed, as I have no doubt they will, even more of the failures of Obamacare itself will become apparent.

It’s also typical of this administration.  Wind it up, set it loose, and forget about it.  Who cares if it doesn’t work?  That’s someone else’s responsibility.

Tapering

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It seems the Fed is serious this time about starting tapering from its QEx foolishness—they’ve begun—and serious about continuing it—Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, in his last FOMC meeting as Chairman, is unlikely to stop the taper, and incoming chairwoman Janet Yellen seems in no position to stop it.  And that’s generating some results.

[N]ow that the Fed seems set on drawing down the QE era, investors are hedging their bets and returning to dollar and euro assets.

The hardest hit are the countries with policies least able to stand without the Fed prop.  That includes Argentina, which the Kirchner clique has run like Venezuela without the populist charm.  Turkey’s lira has taken a bath amid the political showdown over corruption, a large current-account deficit, and monetary policy that has been too easy for too long.  Russia’s ruble is also hitting new lows against the euro, as its economy increasingly looks like a one-act play (oil).

And

A country that runs the world’s reserve currency is also the world’s central banker….  The last week’s exchange-rate gyrations are a repeat of what happened last summer when Mr Bernanke made clear he wanted to begin tapering the Fed’s bond-buying.  …  Now the Fed is leaking that it will keep tapering at its meeting next week, probably by another $10 billion, and markets are moving again.

This is hitting the domestic stock market, too, but then the market is not the economy—which is another factor underlying the domestic market’s negativity over tapering’s onset.

Get used to it, boys and girls.  We may be the world’s banker, but we aren’t the world’s piggy bank.

More Obamacare Dishonesty

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It’s gotten so blatant that now they’re not even trying to disguise it.

What the Obama administration said publicly:

Per John Goodman:

Week after week, month after month, the Obama administration kept telling us everything’s working fine, there’s no problem and then they turn on a dime and fire their contractor.

President Barack Obama himself, through his Press Secretary, Jay Carney:

I didn’t see the article [containing statements to CGI’s replacement contractor on the ObamaMart re-do] I’m not aware of those statements[.]

What HHS said in its no-bid (!) contract request to Accenture, who’s replacing CGI on the ObamaMart Web development/fix:

the problems with the website puts “the entire health insurance industry at risk”…potentially leading to their default and disrupting continued services and coverage to consumers.

And

without the fixes “the entire health care reform program is jeopardized.”

And

if the problems were not fixed by mid-March, “they will result in financial harm to the government.”

Actually, not so much the government, beyond the precious egos of the current Senate and White House occupants, rather the financial harm is to those funding the government—us taxpayers—in the form of wasted taxes, higher health coverage costs, less access to the medical facilities of our choice, etc.

Among those fatal flaws is that ObamaMart’s back end—the part that’s supposed to transmit enrollment data, subsidy eligibility and amount, and so on to the insurer—hasn’t been built.  Not after almost four years since Obamacare was enacted, not nearly four months after the ObamaMart Web site was forced live and the failures of the site and of the law made manifest.

But the Obama administration continues to insist, publicly, that everything’s jake.

Hotel ObamaMart

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You can check in, but they do everything they can to keep you from checking out.

A Missouri citizen had her preferred insurance coverage canceled out from under her by Obamacare.  She was forced by circumstance into the ObamaMart, where she got coverage for $950/mo (that’s $11,400 each and every year, for those of you following along at home).

After that, she found a better plan with coverage that better suited her needs on what’s left of the private market, and she tried to sign up.  No dice; the insurer told her she’d have to cancel her Obamacare policy first (not allowed to buy two policies from two different stores, apparently).

Cancel an Obamacare plan?  Hah.  Wolves have easier times escaping from traps.

  • the citizen tried ObamaMart’s Help line, to be kept on hold “literally…for several hours a day”
  • multiple attempts, with no luck; on to ObamaMart’s online chat facility
  • sent back to the “Help” line where, still, the pseudo-helpers on the ObamaMart end of the line only would read from a script that had no checklist items for canceling plans
  • despite her efforts, a $950 premium was withdrawn from her account
  • finally getting through ObamaMart’s “Help” facility to another bureaucratic layer, the bureaucrat inhabiting that cubicle told her cancellations are handled by a “special department”
  • asked how to contact that “special department,” the bureaucrat claimed, “I’m not allowed to tell you that”
  • drove to Kansas City, hoping her prospective private market insurer could help her get rid of this ObamaMart yoke
  • insurer succeeded in getting the ObamaMart plan canceled—after a total of six weeks from start to finish

When Fox News asked HHS what the proper procedures are for canceling an ObamaMart policy, the spokesman just said to talk to the hand:

Consumers should call the Marketplace consumer call center for assistance at 1-800-318-2596.

And the run-around takes another lap.

No word on whether she got her $950 back.  Probably not, though; that’s just part of President Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth around” mandate.