Category Archives: regulation

Big Brother

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The state of Washington’s Gambling Commission has found a whole new kind of problem for government to worry about.  It seems that the senior citizens of that fine state have developed a nasty habit of getting together and playing…cards.  That’s right.  Poker.

The Gaming Commission, though, has become aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a poker table in their State.  There’s trouble, they say.  And that starts with “T,” and that rhymes with “P,” and that stands for Poker.  And all night long those Washington seniors will be frittering—frittering!—their time away.

Yes, they got Trouble with a capital T right there in Washington State.

In fact, those misbehaving seniors in the Snohomish Senior Center have been playing illegally for over four years, ever since the Snohomish city council banned such social card games in 2009.  No more, though.  Ever alert to serious problems, the Gaming Commission sent those miscreants a letter and shut down their games (they also were playing such nasty things as bridge and pinochle—and doing all that for actual pennies).

Never mind that the Center’s Executive Director, Bob Dvorak, has tried to explain that the center provides an important mechanism for getting an often disengaged group of folks together and defeat their aloneness.

It keeps them from being isolated.  They’re in for the nutritious meal, and they have social skills; they see their friends, they see the staff.

We want them in a safe, fun environment where they’re surrounded by their friends and colleagues.

But Dvorak said that if seniors can’t play for pennies, they might not come at all.  Oh, well.

Gaming has been cleaned up, but there’s still Trouble in Washington.  But now it’s a different kind.  It stems from Big Brother Knowing Better.  Because grown, adult human beings of an age need to be told what to do.

Regulations Begetting Regulations

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Insurers are facing pressure from regulators and lawmakers about plans that offer limited choices of doctors and hospitals, a tactic the industry said is vital to keep down coverage prices in the new health law’s marketplaces.

Yeah—Obamacare regulates what coverages must be offered and at what prices (i.e., at no increase in price while adding mandatory coverage for contraceptives, pre-natal care, maternity care, etc.  And regardless of whether the man required to buy a health plan needs these things.  Or the empty-nesters.  Or post-menopausal women.  Or…).

However, since the insurers can only control costs—and remain in this new business of supplying government-mandated welfare—by controlling how many doctors or hospitals are in their networks, now we “need” additional regulations to “instruct” the insurers in this area.

Under [a] new federal proposal, insurers selling plans in the federally run marketplace would be required to submit to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services a full list of providers in a network before their plans are approved for listing in the exchanges.  In the future, regulators also plan to develop federal standards for the required number of providers.

And [Emphasis added]

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said he plans to revise his agency’s standards for insurers’ health networks partly because current regulations don’t give him enough power to continue oversight after a health plan goes on the market.

And so on, across lots of states.

Of course, absent government’s Obamacare intervention in this “market,” such layers of regulation wouldn’t be necessary.  The bottom layer of regulation wouldn’t be necessary.

But then, what would these bureaucrats do for jobs?  How would Progressive politicians justify their elective jobs?

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.

Improvements in Police Technology

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Criminals may not have a chance in 2025, when the cop of the future will be an imposing crime-fighting machine, able to see around corners in urban environments, identify suspects at a glance, safely pursue stolen cars and effortlessly bring unruly crowds under control.

And

Police departments around the country are already testing technologies like Google Glass, lapel cameras and tracking devices that allow safer pursuit of fleeing suspects.  But this is merely a glimpse of what’s to come, according to experts contacted by FoxNews.com.  They said increasing reliance on data mining, predictive analysis and all manner of gadgets will make getting away with crime harder than ever.

These technologies are ripe for misuse, too, by arms of the government, like police departments.  Does that mean we should work to deny these technologies to the police?  Absolutely not.  We expect them to put their lives on the line in order to “protect and serve” us; we have a moral obligation, if nothing else, to equip them with the tools and training needed to do that most efficaciously.

No, what we need to be vigilant about is this: our government cannot be permitted to deny us ordinary citizens those same technologies.

Think 2nd Amendment and the efforts of nefarious governments to disarm the citizenry, with the deleterious outcomes of those efforts.  Technology qua technology can be a weapon, too.  And, as gun statistic after gun statistic demonstrates, weapons widely in the hands of us ordinary citizens actually leads to reduced crime rates.

California Gun Control Foolishness

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California now requires handguns to do microstamping on the weapons’ firing pins so as to mark the bullet casing to facilitate tracing a weapon used in a crime back to the weapon’s registered owner.  (Actually, they’ve been requiring it since 2007; they’ve only just begun enforcing that this year.)

Leaving aside the lack of legitimacy of this move toward gun control and even the fact that the technology for doing this microstamping isn’t yet stable, much less proven, it’s foolish to the point of dishonesty (since I don’t agree that even California state legislators are slack-jawed, drooling idiots) for a number of reasons.

Police handguns are exempted from the microstamping requirement.  This is selective enforcement.  Aside from that, why should the police be exempted when their employers, the citizenry, are not?  On top of that, to the extent microstamping is a good idea, it would be useful for demonstrating police misbehavior in a shooting—or for demonstrating that the shooting was justified.

The traceability of the firearm that’s claimed for microstamping ignores the fact that the weapon used may have been lost by the legitimate owner, or (quite likely) stolen from him.

It’s easy enough to file the microstamping off the firing pin, just as it’s easy enough to file a firearm’s serial number off the firearm.

Forensics traces markings on bullets left by the rifling of a firearm’s barrel to the original firearm.  Except when the barrel used in a crime is ditched and a new barrel inserted, a thing easily done in a couple of minutes.  So it is with the firing pins of most…handguns.  In the ordinary process of stripping the firearm for cleaning and maintenance, both the barrel and the firing pin are taken out of the piece.  It’s that simple.

This is a law that can’t work as advertised, quite apart from what we might think of the degree of gun control that’s appropriate.  Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger recognize this, and both companies are moving to stop selling their firearms in California.

Which is gun control, toward which the state’s legislature may have been moving with this law all along.