Tag Archives: regulation

Distressing to Whom?

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Scientists have zapped an electrical current to people’s brains to erase distressing memories, part of an ambitious quest to better treat ailments such as mental trauma, psychiatric disorders and drug addiction.

In an experiment, patients were first shown a troubling story, in words and pictures.  A week later they were reminded about it and given electroconvulsive therapy, formerly known as electroshock.  That completely wiped out their recall of the distressing narrative.

“It’s a pretty strong effect.  We observed it in every subject,” said Marijn Kroes, neuroscientist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study, published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

And

The hope is that one day it may be possible to selectively eliminate a person’s unwanted memories or associations linked to smoking, drug-taking or emotional trauma.

This is an extremely promising tool for helping folks overcome serious troubles.  Like many powerful tools, though, it can be very dangerous.

“Distressing memories.”  Distressing for whom?  The individual? Or Government?  Rudimentary efforts have already been tried: the Soviet Union’s Gulag.  It’s been warned of for a long time: Clockwork Orange.

Now that this sort of thing is coming to fruition, the tool wants, badly, close monitoring and control, and not only by our government.

Massive Overhauls

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Obamacare (and its microcosm, Cover Oregon) are textbook examples—case studies, even—of the utter failure of any attempt to execute a massive change of anything in one fell swoop.  The attempt is born of good intentions heavily informed with arrogance, with a good measure of impatience added: we don’t need to see how things are going, our plan is sound because our hearts are pure.

No.  Every change needs interim evaluation steps with which to determine whether the golden plan is, in fact, still on track and if not what changes are necessary—even to the point of changing course or canceling the program rather than mindlessly tweaking the present stage due to glitches.  The ubiquitousness of unintended consequences alone dictates that.

And the program doesn’t have to be done right now.  It just has to be done (always assuming we’re agreed on the program, an agreement notably absent with Obamacare, but that lack is for another time).

Now President Barack Obamacare wants to do another massive, all in one step, change of another enormous system: our collection of immigration laws.

President Obama and his top Democrats on Capitol Hill appear to have reset their sights on the Republican-controlled House passing comprehensive immigration reform, instead of a step-by-step process.

The president on Friday appeared to urge the House to back the comprehensive, bipartisan immigration bill the Senate passed this summer….

What was that bit about repeating a thing and expecting different results?

Another Judge Gets It Right

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Federal Judge Timothy DeGiusti has issued a preliminary injunction against Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate, thereby preventing the Feds, for the time being, from requiring organizations in the Western District of Oklahoma to make available insurance policies that cover the morning-after pill and similar contraceptives, and contraceptives in general.

GuideStone Financial Resources, an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention that handles health benefits for the Convention, brought the suit on behalf of nearly 200 ministries that use GFR to provide benefits for their employees.

It’s important to note that this is a preliminary injunction, and it can be overruled at any time.  However, it is intended to last throughout the suit itself: GFR, et al., have the right, says the Judge, to pursue their case, and it’s necessary to protect them from the harm caused by enforcement until the matter is settled.  After all, GFR, et al., have an excellent chance of winning the suit.

And they should win.  No government has any business dictating the religious tenets of our citizenry, nor does any government have any legitimate authority with which to overrule those tenets—especially for the petty convenience of that government.

DeGiusti’s ruling can be read here.

Foolishly Lawless

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Are there other ways of being lawless that matter?  Of course there are, but that’s for a different post.  The foolishness of this example of the Obama administration’s lawlessness is the subject here.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced (sotto voce, via a letter to selected Senators) the latest rewrite non-legislatively effected change to the Obamacare law.

She…would allow people who got cancellations and could not find affordable new coverage to qualify for a “hardship exemption” in order to avoid a penalty next year for not having insurance.

Further…those individuals will be able to purchase bare-bones plans [catastrophic coverage plans] that until now were available only for people under 30.

…expected it to impact fewer than 500,000 people.

Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) remarked,

Holding a fire sale of cheap insurance is not a responsible fix for a broken program.  This is a slap in the face to the thousands of Americans who have already purchased expensive insurance through the ObamaCare exchanges.

There are more than 5 million Americans in this sinking canceled insurance plan boat, though, not a half million.  And what about those folks who have already re-signed into suboptimal (but more expensive to make up for it) Obamacare plans about whom Rubio worries?  The open enrollment period doesn’t end until next March: how many of those folks will cancel their shiny, new, more expensive Obamacare plans and pick, instead, the Sebelius Plan—to the detriment of the Obamacare law cost structure?

Moreover, the “hardship exemption” under which Sebelius is offering her Plan says this about eligible hardships [emphasis added]:

…experienced financial or domestic circumstances, including an unexpected natural or human-caused event, such that he or she had a significant, unexpected increase in essential expenses that prevented him or her from obtaining coverage under a qualified health plan.

Is Sebelius really saying that Obamacare is a Man-Caused Disaster?

Finally, all this Individual Mandate…folderol…is coming after Obama and his Senate cronies shut down the government rather than delay the Individual Mandate.

Just how idiotic can one grown, adult President and one grown, adult Cabinet Secretary be in one lifetime?

Health Insurance Premium Changes Due To Obamacare

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There is a March 2013 report coming to light, prepared jointly by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Majority Staff; the Senate Committee on Finance, Minority Staff; and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, Minority Staff, titled The Price of Obamacare’s Broken Promises: Young Adults and Middle Class Families Set to Endure Higher Premiums and Unaffordable Coverage, and it’s available here.

There’s a lot of data in the eight-page report, but the money figure is this one:

Those were estimates last spring, and for two states, the estimates weren’t available.

As of last September, though, Forbes estimated Vermont as having premium increases ranging from 71% to 157%, depending on age, and New York having a rate decrease in the neighborhood of 40%.  Forbes also estimated that some 17 states would see premium decreases in at least one age/gender demographic; although with many of those seeing the decrease in only one or two such categories.

Since Obamacare went live nearly three months ago, customers—especially those who’ve had their policies canceled out from under them—are seeing just these increases, and they’re also seeing enormous increases in deductibles—the amount of out of pocket expenses that must be absorbed by the patient before an Obamacare policy kicks in to pay (for a Bronze plan) all of 60% of the patient’s expenses.  For that year.  That’s a really sick patient to have all those expenses before coverage kicks in.

Some deal, this Obamacare.