Category Archives: markets

Some of the Worst Is Arriving

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Earlier, I wrote about Senator Tim Scott’s (R, SC) concerns about the broader picture of the Obamacare failure.  It seems Scott was optimistic in some respects.  Jerry Markon, in The Washington Post, has written about the already ongoing failure Obamacare’s insurance co-ops, which are different from the exchanges that some states have set up and which the Federal government, under the auspices of Obamacare, has set up in 36 states and set loose on an unsuspecting public (that HealthCare.gov thingie).

These co-ops are

a network of nonprofit insurance companies aimed at bringing competition to the marketplace, long dominated by major insurers.

But these co-ops, started as a great hope for lowering insurance costs, are already in danger.

The danger is clear and present:

One co-op, however, has closed, another is struggling, and at least nine more have been projected to have financial problems, according to internal government reviews and a federal audit.

Their failure would leave taxpayers potentially on the hook for nearly $1 billion in defaulted loans and rob the marketplace of the kind of competition they were supposed to create.  And if they become insolvent, policyholders in at least half the states where the co-ops operate could be stuck with medical bills.

That’s out of roughly 24 in 24 states.

Worse, these operations were designed to fail: the then-Democrat dominated Congress loaded these entities with restrictions that, individually, elevated the risks for their survival, and in the aggregate, made their survival nearly impossible.

  • Federal grants for the co-ops were converted to loans with tight repayment schedules
  • co-ops were barred from using federal money for marketing
  • co-ops were severely limited from selling insurance to large employers…the most lucrative market

And so on.  This is one of the outcomes of central control of an economy—or even one-sixth of one.

The Obama Infomercial

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Here’s another installment in President Barack Obama’s late night cable shill Rose Garden 800 number pitch (Operators are standing by!):

The online chat functionality turns out to be as dysfunctional as his 800 number—although, in fairness to the pitchman, he didn’t push the chat bit.  In an example excerpted on YouTube, you can see agent “Dean” advising a customer, “Adrian:”

Don’t lose your sanity over this website.  Try it.  If it doesn’t work, walk away.  Try it tomorrow.

and

Don’t run with scissors.

The transcript of the complete 12-minute chat is here (scroll down).  As you read it, notice two things: one is the admission of using canned answers, together with their near-irrelevance to the questions being asked.  The other is Agent Dean hanging up on Adrian in mid-chat.

This is government customer service, government medicine style.

Obamacare “Fix”

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Health and Human Services is claiming—carefully buried in one of their blogs, rather than on the Web site’s front page—that among the fixes they have in place is the ability for potential health insurance buyers to check out the policies and premiums on offer before they’re required to create an account (to register) and start giving up personal information.

Sure enough, they’ve got a cool new SEE PLANS NOW button on the front page of HealthCare.gov.  Along with the warning that, as of today (24 Oct 13), I only have 158 days to figure out a way past this…software…and get enrolled.

So, how’d that button work?  Not very well, as this attempt (24 Oct, still) demonstrates:

There’s a button added, and the problem has been passed along.

The old “a problem passed is a problem solved” meme.

Notice in passing, too: that’s a 37-character “Reference ID” that I’m supposed to read over the phone to someone in HHS’ call center for HealthCare.gov.  Yeah.

A Typical Bureaucracy

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Via the Washington Examiner comes this Obamacare bureaucracy organization chart.  Maybe it’s satirical.

This damning charge about Obamacare preparation by that bureaucracy comes from the same link:

Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project.

How does that work, exactly?  Oh, wait—maybe the WE is overstating the case a bit—does any bureaucracy with that organization look like it’s capable of making any decision more complex than whether to get a cup of coffee on the way back from the rest room?

Plus this: The officials running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided they would act as the systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program.  Pay no attention to the fact that the CMS is, itself, an agglomeration of lots of disparate organizations.  Or that the officials “in charge” there have no concept of organizational, much less systems, organization.

But RTWT.

And this, from The Wall Street Journal, on President Barack Obama’s Rose Garden version of a Shamwow Infomercial pitch–Operators are standing by! [I stole that line from Chris Stirewalt]–and his touting his 800 number as the fix to all the…kinks…in his Obamacare:

[W]e called the hotline on Monday and the automated menu redirected us to Healthcare.gov, which in turn told us to get in touch with someone at the call center.

Yeah.

Jim DeMint: We Won’t Back Down on ObamaCare

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My title is taken from Jim DeMint’s Wall Street Journal op-ed of the same name.  In his piece, he makes the following points.

The reason [the Heritage Foundation, and other conservatives chose this moment to fight] is simple: to protect the American people from the harmful effects of this law.

And

More and more people have had their work hours cut, their jobs eliminated and their coverage taken away as a result of this new law.

Further, research by Drew Gonshorowski of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation indicates that

…the hardest hit by the increases will be young adults.  “A state that exhibits this clearly is Vermont…where the increase for 27-year-olds is 144% and the increase for 50-year-olds is still 60%, but far less.  All states exhibit this relationship.

DeMint has lots more; you get the idea.  However, he’s missing some key factors.  No Conservative, and almost no Republican—not just the Heritage Foundation—will back down on Obamacare, but they need three things in order to do more than “not back down,” in order instead actually to succeed concerning Obamacare:

They need better tactics.

They need better communication skills.

They need better candidates with whom then to win actual elections and thereby gain majorities in both houses of Congress and win the White House.  President Barack Obama was taunting Republicans when he said,

You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president, then argue for your position.  Go out there, and win an election.

But he’s right.

Conservatives’ and Republicans’ current tactic of burning the bridge and then trying to cross the river won’t work.  Until elections are won, what must be done is to clear out some of Obamacare’s more blatant nonsense. This includes things that even Progressives in the Senate agree on, like the job-killing medical device tax; things that even Conservatives should be agreeing on, like the tax on union and big employer “Cadillac” health insurance plans (Conservatives also need to lose their Progressive-like knee-jerk resistance to anything a union might like.  Unions and Conservatives might never be friends, but there’s much about Obamacare on which unions and Conservatives can be allies.)  Conservatives also can push to repeal the administration’s OMB diktat that the law doesn’t apply to Congressmen and their staffers: that mendacious, taxpayer-funded subsidy for buying health insurance, on the Obamacare exchanges or anywhere else, needs to be withdrawn.

Until elections are won (and continuing after), they need actually to talk with their constituents—and with their Democrat neighbors’ constituents—directly, where these Americans, these voters, live.  Further, they need to do so with a unified, coherent message of how Conservative policies will help the individuals they’re directly speaking with.  It’s insufficient to send an occasional email (while then deciding not to respond when recipients email back), or to make speeches on the House or Senate floor, or to give sound-bite interviews on the steps or in the halls of Capitol Hill.

Finally, in order to win those elections, Conservatives and Republicans need to do a better job of selecting candidates in their primaries and then running them in the elections.  Their handling of the Cuccinelli candidacy in Virginia and the Lonegan candidacy in New Jersey is (and was)…poor.

When Republicans and Conservatives come up with a coherent message, when they improve their tactics, when they select better candidates—and support them—then Republicans and Conservatives will be able to answer Obama’s taunt and actually take control of the Congress and the White House.  Then, and not sooner, they’ll be able to replace Obamacare and, oh by the way, get spending and our debt under control.