Category Archives: markets

An Implication of Obamacare

Posted on by
Reply

…that’s little talked about.  It follows, though, Obamacare’s segmentation of “insurance” coverage into high-payers—the young, who are poor—and the low-payers—the elderly, who are well established—and into metal groups differentiated solely by what per centage of costs will be covered after deductibles have been consumed for the year.

The implication is this, a buried one-liner in a Wall Street Journal article:

…the health law bars insurers from taking medical history into account when setting prices.

Imagine that.  Underwriters, when designing an “insurance” policy intended to transfer health-related risk, aren’t allowed to incorporate questions of health into their risk assessments.

Hmm….

Negligence

Posted on by
Reply

An Obama-administration official announced that the portion of the Healthcare.gov system that would allow users to pay insurance companies with marketplace subsidies will not be available for another two months.

And yet ObamaMart was rolled out 7 weeks ago, knowing this small component wasn’t ready.

A couple of possible outcomes: an insuree might show up at the doctor’s office—or hospital—and discover he owes full freight, even though he’d “successfully” signed up, subsidies and all.  Alternatively, an insuree might show up at the doctor’s office—or hospital—and discover he’s not covered at all, yet, even though he’d “successfully” signed up.

Indeed, Henry Chao, CMS’ Deputy Chief Information Officer, has already testified in front of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce that as much as 40% of the technical systems supporting ObamaMart aren’t even built.  That sample of missing parts includes security, in addition to this matter of payment.

Holy cats.

Some Lies of Obamacare

Posted on by
Reply

It seems, now, that President Barack Obama’s administration knew of the potential for the ObamaMart failure as early as last March (but, no, not Obama himself; he only hears about things from the newspapers, not from anyone in his employ).  Then, apparently, they promptly lied about that potential ‘way back then.

Key administration officials at the White House and Department of Health and Human Services received briefings this past spring from McKinsey & Co, a private consulting firm that reviewed more than 200 documents and conducted interviews with HHS staff to identify potential problems before the Oct 1 rollout.

…including insufficient testing and evolving requirements. The report also warned that the program relied too heavily on outside contractors.

And

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Medicare Chief Marilyn Tavenner, and Gary Cohen, a Medicare and Medicaid oversight official, attended a briefing on the firm’s analysis on April 4[.]

Then

Sebelius testified at an oversight committee hearing two weeks after being briefed on the McKinsey report that the implementation of ObamaCare was on track[.]

The seeming lie nature of Sebelius’ testimony—certainly, problems identified in March could have been addressed by Rollout Date—is indicated by the fact that when Healthcare.gov ObamaMart launched, those problems, or problems very like those identified by McKinsey, remained in place, unresolved.

Should It Be?

Posted on by
Reply

Fox News asked, over the weekend, whether ObamaCare can be saved.  But the real question is whether it should be—that hasn’t been established, yet.

Indeed, the basic question is whether this country should be providing universal health welfare—which is what Obamacare attempts to do; this law eliminates any insurance aspect from its purported health “insurance” program—at all.

Obamacare, as it stands, is not what Americans want.  Poll after poll, across the three years since the law’s enactment, demonstrate this.  The law’s internal contradictions, quite apart from its masquerade as insurance, make its efficacy—its very legitimacy—nonexistent.

Obamacare has the poor subsidizing the better off: young and healthy are required to buy “insurance” they don’t need at inflated prices in order that older Americans can buy “insurance” at artificially depressed prices.

Single men and empty nesters are required to buy “insurance” that covers women’s prenatal and maternity care—as well as the extremely cheap commodity of birth control pills so that women of child-bearing and rearing age can buy these coverages at artificially deflated prices—and get their birth control pill for “free.”

Millions of Americans (5 million and counting in the private individual market, the ObamaFix notwithstanding, with small business policies to follow in a few months and the employer mandate to take effect in a year) are being forced off their insurance policies, policies for which preference has been demonstrated both by Americans’ purchase of them and the hue and cry over their loss, all so that they will be driven into the ObamaMart to buy government-approved “insurance” at much higher premiums and much higher deductibles.

The law’s design is explicit: to redistribute wealth.  Period.  This is a redistribution of wealth from those who don’t have it to those who, if not exactly wealthy, generally are better off and certainly more established.  This is a redistribution of wealth, also, from one group of sort-of-haves to a different group—government preferred—of sort-of-haves.