Category Archives: morality

Delay the Individual Mandate?

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Kate Rogers, of Fox Business, had some thoughts.

Delaying the sign-up deadline would give the government more time to work out the kinks on healthcare.gov and allow users to become more familiar with the site and find the best plan that fits their needs, experts say.

But would it give sufficient time for the rest of the problems with implementation data reporting to insurers, payments for claims, etc to be worked out?  Time to work out the “kinks” in the law itself?

On the don’t delay side, she has this:

“As an economist, I can assume that the people with the most expensive health-care needs: the oldest and sickest, would be spending thousands out of pocket on health care and are the ones with the most demand for the product,” [Devon Herrick, National Center for Policy Analysis Senior Analyst] says.  “Younger people, if they get a break or are told they can wait three months, they may do that.  You can’t run a risk pool with the sickest people jumping in on day one, and the healthiest on day 90.”

Why would the healthiest jump in at all, though?  This is a bad bet for them.  Further, under what moral system can a government compel them to jump in?

In the end, the Individual Mandate needs to be delayed, if only to balance the Employer Mandate delay—but both of those need to be delayed only as stepping stones to getting rid of Obamacare and replacing it with a proper, market- and patient/doctor-oriented reform.

“I’m Not Pulling the Cat’s Tail”

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President Barack Obama had this to say, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney, about the Obama lie that “if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.  Period.”

Insurers pulled those plans away from them.  The law [Obamacare] could not order insurers not to cancel that plan.

His…spokeswoman…Valerie Jarrett had much the same thing to say.

Never mind that those plans no longer were legal under Obamacare and that Obama knew it.

“I’m just hanging on to the tail.  The cat’s doing the pulling.”

Obamacare and the Sequester

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Sequester—that invention of President Barack Obama, with which he intended to extort Republicans and Conservatives into acceding to his taxing, spending, and borrowing economic policy—is starting to cause trouble for Obamacare, now.  The sequester is blocking a set of subsidies that were supposed to help pay deductibles and co-pays under Obamacare.

Amy Payne, writing for The Foundry, quoted Chris Jacobs in The Wall Street Journal on impacts:

There are two possible outcomes.  The first is that individuals who have managed to enroll in subsidized health insurance will find they’ve been misled about their copays and deductibles.  Families who currently think their plan will charge a $20 copayment for doctor visits may instead face a $25 charge when the sequester kicks in.  Individuals who now believe they face maximum out-of-pocket costs of $2,000 may end up paying hundreds more.

Wonderful performance by a President who’s a better policy wonk than his policy staff.

Where to Cut

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As the recent government shutdown demonstrated, there’s a lot of fat that can be cut in the personnel department.  This is no fault of the personnel, but the fact is, we don’t need that many in Federal employ.

Here are a couple more items on that score.

The Department of Agriculture is fairly typical of most agencies in its sometimes incongruous responsibilities and huge some say too huge workforce.  It employs roughly 99,000 people to service the roughly 1.4 million Americans employed in farming.

That’s 14 farmers for every DA employee.

And this on the states being absolved, more and more, of their responsibilities by the Federal government:

“Ronald Reagan had a yellow book test,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.  “If something could be found in the Yellow Book, it should be done by the private sector.  Unfortunately, the administration now is taking the opposite view, claiming many services are inherently governmental, and therefore not subject to competition.”

Which feeds back into the bloat in Departments like the DA and those listed on the other side of the first link above.

Government and Personal Information Security

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Government snooping on the ObamaCare website certainly raises alarms.  But [TrustedSec President, David] Kennedy says even more concerning is that—according to his research—HealthCare.gov is riddled with holes in security.

“We can look at the code that’s behind it,” Kennedy told Fox News, “look at how things work.  And we can tell that there wasn’t even minimum standards bolted onto this application, even before its release.”

The Feds, of course, insist otherwise.  Health and Human Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner testified before last week’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing:

They can trust that the information they’re providing is protected to the highest privacy standards.

Kennedy again:

If I was allowed to attack the website by myself and I had approval to go and do it, it would be very simple for me to break into it, steal all that information that’s in the database including all of your personal information that you used to register for the site, Social Security numbers—everything like that.

Which one has the greater vested interest in the claims?