Tag Archives: regulation

Why Is Delta Afraid?

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Indeed.  Or, it’s just an abuse of market power?

Paulding County, GA, has an airport, Silver Comet Field, and Paulding wants to have a small air line operate all of four or five flights per day out of it.  Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is 40 miles away, has five runways, 203 gates, and a 46 million passenger-per-year throughput.  Delta Airlines, which uses Hartsfield for its hub, is feeling so threatened by this dinky little airport that it’s doing everything it can to stifle Paulding’s “competition.”

Holden Shannon, a “senior executive” for Delta put an op-ed into the Atlanta Journal-Constitution worrying, with no irony, that

a second airport can quickly expand, and the impact on Hartsfield-Jackson would be significant.

This, though, is sort of the nature of free competition.  Is this what Delta fears?

Shannon also said competition from Paulding would “threaten Atlanta’s economy.”  But the only form the competition would take would be from price competition, making consumers better off.  Is Delta really so fragile that one more, dinky, entrant into the market will push it over the edge?  Is Delta that badly run?  Is that what Delta fears?

He also complained to the Paulding County Commission Chairman, bellyaching that Silver Comet Field’s plans supposedly were hatched in secrecy.  But he chose not to explain why a business is obligated to form its plans in full view of its competitors.

Shannon isn’t the only Delta executive with his knickers bunched, either.  Richard Anderson, Delta’s CEO, told the AJC that the planned commercial operation would be “an economic and community failure.”  Never mind that that’s not Anderson’s call—that’s for the market and the community to decide.  Is this what Delta fears—that the market will decide in favor of competition?

Hmm….

Obamacare Blocking People from Getting Coverage?

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A Better LA, a decade-old Los Angeles nonprofit, said last week it was signing up 50 low-income people for health plans in California’s health-insurance marketplace.  The charity, which said it has the blessing of the state agency overseeing the marketplace, will pay $50 to $100 a month to cover the share of the people’s premiums not already financed by federal subsidies.

Nonprofits, including some hospitals, say paying premiums would ensure coverage for people currently uninsured who can’t afford even a small monthly payment for health insurance.

But.  There’s always a but. This but is this, from Karen Ignagni, President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the health-insurance industry’s trade group (who, incidentally, declines to explain the claimed logistics problem of reissuing health insurance plans that were in force just a month ago):

It is a conflict of interest for hospitals and drug companies to pay patients’ premiums and cost-sharing for the sole purpose of increasing utilization of their services and products.

Of course, Ignagni has no conflict of interest herself.  Mm, mm.

And

[The] HHS unit that is implementing the health law said it would “discourage” hospitals and other commercial entities from paying premiums.  It asked insurers to reject such payments and warned that it would take further action if necessary.

HHS has significant concerns with this practice….

The Democrats and the insurance companies in cahoots with them pretended to concern about the poor and the elderly sick being unable to afford medical care because they couldn’t afford health insurance.  Now those same worthies are moving to block those poor and elderly sick from getting exactly that coverage solely because they’re not getting coverage in the way those Democrats deem acceptable.  Apparently, the Democrats’ concern had nothing to do with the welfare of the poor and the elderly sick and everything to do with getting their votes.

The insurance companies?  It’s time to cut out the coddling and dump them into a free, competitive market place.

Rule…Law

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Christopher DeMuth, writing in The Weekly Standard, notes among other things that

Obamacare is introducing a new form of government​—​improvisational government, characterized by continuous ad hoc revisions of statutory law by executive decree. This is a reversion to a primitive form that long antedates our Constitution and rule-of-law traditions.

Indeed.  What DeMuth calls “continuous ad hoc revisions…by decree” is simply rule-by-law.  Something at which the People’s Republic of China has excelled for centuries.  President Barack Obama might well take some advice from those folks.

The Idiocy of Lawlessness

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Leaving aside the lawlessness of HHS’ new “rules” demanding that their new subjects, the insurance companies, govern their businesses according to HHS diktats, following are some examples of the utter stupidity flowing from that lawlessness.

“asking” insurers to take a flexible approach about their rules when patients refill prescriptions or see their existing doctor in the early days of the new year in case new health plans haven’t kicked in.

Never mind that the old plans, that included those doctors and drug coverages, are illegal under Obamacare, and so no legal coverage exists for them.  This also ignores the mechanics of the insurers getting paid, eventually, by the patient, and by the Federal government when subsidies are involved.

“encouraging” insurers to begin coverage in the new year even if applicants miss the deadline by a few days.

Never mind that, especially with the failure of ObamaMart to deliver necessary enrollment and sign-up data to the insurers, those insurers have no way of knowing that those claiming coverage actually are covered, neither do those claiming coverage have any way of knowing they’re actually covered, and neither do the doctors and hospitals have any way of knowing whether they’re included in the claimed plans.  Just try to sort out the fraud from the honest mistakes from the utter failures in this environment.

requiring that enrollees who pay their first month’s premium by Dec 31 be given coverage starting the next day.

Never mind that ObamaMart can’t even tell the insurers who has enrolled.  Never mind that, even when information flows as it should, insurers have no hope of reacting that quickly, even in an on-line world.  Thus, see above about who knows what and how to sort out fraud from….

“calling on insurers” to refill through January prescriptions covered under previous plans.  …insurers should continue covering at standard rates patients’ visits to doctors they had seen under their old policies, even if those doctors weren’t part of a new plan’s network.

“strongly encouraging” insurers to treat out-of-network providers as in-network to ensure continuity of care for acute episodes.

Never mind that those plans are illegal, the coverage under them non-existent by government decree.

Never mind that the insurers have no hope of reimbursement for any fraud that occurs, nor any expectation of timely—if any at all—payment of subsidies due, since ObamaMart’s software is wholly incapable of determining who’s eligible for subsidies, much less how much any particular Obamacare welfare recipient might be due.

Keep in mind that when the Federal government “asks” for something, it’s largely indiscriminable from a demand.  See the IRS’ treatment of government-disapproved groups of Americans, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ treatment of insurance companies who objected to Obamacare while it was being developed, Congressman Henry Waxman’s (D, CA) treatment of companies who laid out the early costs of Obamacare.

The Administration of Stupid just keeps rolling along.

Government and Legislative “Intentions”

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Halbig v Sebelius is a case that opened last Tuesday in the DC District Court that challenges the legality of Obamacare subsidies, and through that the applicability of the Employer and Individual Mandates, in states that have ObamaMart—Federal health insurance exchanges—rather than state-run exchanges.

The case hinges on what the Obamacare law says vs what Government says it says and what Congress’ “intentions” were.  Leave aside for now then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remark that it was necessary to pass the law to know what was in it along with the admissions of most Representatives and Senators that they had not even read the 900-page law before they voted on it; following is the argument:

Judge Paul Friedman asked how far, and where, he should go to look for more information about what Congress actually intended with Obamacare.  Plaintiffs—Halbig, et al. (et al. consists of three more private individuals and eight businesses scattered across six states that have ObamaMart running because those states declined to set up state-run exchanges)—said the place to go was the law itself: what does the law say, explicitly, in its text.

Government, on the other hand, says to see the text of the law, but also go further and divine Congress’ intentions when it passed the law.

Which brings me back to Pelosi’s remark and those admissions.  Congress didn’t know what was in the law when it passed it; that information didn’t become available until after it was passed.  Not knowing what was in the law when it was passed plainly means that Congress cannot have known its intentions for the law when it passed the law.  Government’s insistence on divining intentions in this case, then, demands a level of mind reading that’s beyond even the talents of a Federal District Judge.  Or those of appellate or Supreme Court judges, which is where this case will go, no matter Friedman’s ruling.

Yet the question matters a very great deal: are citizens in states that have ObamaMart rather than state-run exchanges eligible for premium subsidies, and from that do the Employer and Individual Mandates apply in those states?  The text of the law says that subsidies are available only for those who buy policies through the state exchanges.  Government argues that those phantom intentions were that the subsidies were to be available for policies purchased through ObamaMart, also.

This matters because subsidies in the 34 states where ObamaMart operates in lieu of state-run exchanges amount to hundreds of billions of dollars of Federal (deficit, debt-building) spending, and those Mandates represent hundreds of billions of dollars (albeit fewer hundreds than those subsidies) of individual and business spending by non-subsidized purchasers of Obamacare policies in order to defray somewhat the costs of those subsidies (and, a separate significance, to pay “insurance” sellers artificially inflated premiums in order to support those sellers’ artificially depressed premiums for subsidized and elderly buyers)