Tag Archives: regulation

Free Speech, Belgian Style

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Didier Bellens, CEO of Belgacom (Belgium’s largest telecommunications company) has been fired.  He complained too much about government regulation and taxes.

As The Wall Street Journal described it,

Over the years, Mr Bellens has launched a number of broadsides against the government.  Friday’s dismissal comes after the latest attack, in which he asked a business club breakfast in the chic Brussels suburb of Uccle, “Who’s the worst shareholder?”  His answer: “The Belgian state.”

Yep.  The Belgian government owns 53.5% of Belgacom.  And the government disapproved of Bellens’ political—even business—speech.  Last Friday, Prime Minister Elio di Rupo fired Bellens, announcing

The repeated, accumulated outbursts have irreversibly damaged the confidence of the Belgian state in Mr Bellens[.]

There can’t even be an argument that Bellens hadn’t been performing up to snuff from a business perspective.  Stefaan Genoe, a telecommunications analyst at brokerage Petercam, had this about Bellens’ results:

Overall, Belgacom has evolved very well strategically during his tenure.  It has a very healthy balance sheet.

Dividends are still attractive, at 8 or 9%[.]

And the Progressives in our own government want to Europeanize us.

Hmm….

Should It Be?

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Fox News asked, over the weekend, whether ObamaCare can be saved.  But the real question is whether it should be—that hasn’t been established, yet.

Indeed, the basic question is whether this country should be providing universal health welfare—which is what Obamacare attempts to do; this law eliminates any insurance aspect from its purported health “insurance” program—at all.

Obamacare, as it stands, is not what Americans want.  Poll after poll, across the three years since the law’s enactment, demonstrate this.  The law’s internal contradictions, quite apart from its masquerade as insurance, make its efficacy—its very legitimacy—nonexistent.

Obamacare has the poor subsidizing the better off: young and healthy are required to buy “insurance” they don’t need at inflated prices in order that older Americans can buy “insurance” at artificially depressed prices.

Single men and empty nesters are required to buy “insurance” that covers women’s prenatal and maternity care—as well as the extremely cheap commodity of birth control pills so that women of child-bearing and rearing age can buy these coverages at artificially deflated prices—and get their birth control pill for “free.”

Millions of Americans (5 million and counting in the private individual market, the ObamaFix notwithstanding, with small business policies to follow in a few months and the employer mandate to take effect in a year) are being forced off their insurance policies, policies for which preference has been demonstrated both by Americans’ purchase of them and the hue and cry over their loss, all so that they will be driven into the ObamaMart to buy government-approved “insurance” at much higher premiums and much higher deductibles.

The law’s design is explicit: to redistribute wealth.  Period.  This is a redistribution of wealth from those who don’t have it to those who, if not exactly wealthy, generally are better off and certainly more established.  This is a redistribution of wealth, also, from one group of sort-of-haves to a different group—government preferred—of sort-of-haves.

Blinder Strikes Again

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Professor Alan Blinder (Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University) opened his Wall Street Journal op-ed, this time, with a correct statement.

But a badly designed website doesn’t signify a badly designed policy.  The goals, principles and major design features of the ACA are barely affected by the government’s health-exchange website catastrophe.  If you liked the basic ideas before, you still should.  If you didn’t, you still shouldn’t.

True enough, the ObamaMart Web site is just the front end of Obamacare (it’s also the back end, handling all of your personal financial and medical history and doing so in an enormously error-prone fashion and so far with no security at all—security has never been seriously tested), it is not Obamacare itself.

But from here, as is usual with Blinder, it’s all downhill.  First is his typically Progressive dishonesty in his characterization of those who oppose Obamacare:

…the enemies of health-care reform are telling [Americans] that ObamaCare is a failure.

Of course, because Obamacare is the only way to reform the health insurance industry (which Blinder also dishonestly conflates with health care).  It couldn’t possibly be that there are other ways to achieve reform, like the half-dozen, or so, House offerings that reform through patient-centric—that is to say, individual American-centric—market solutions.  No, Progressives know that Americans are too stupid to make their own decisions.

Then he gets to his point:

The three central elements of ObamaCare are insurance reform, getting (most of) the uninsured covered, and containing the upward spiral in medical-care costs.  Each remains in place.

He sees this as a plus, not the failure that it is.  Sad.  In turn:

There is no insurance reform, only the destruction (leaving aside its nationalization) of the insurance industry.  The price of an “insurance” policy now is completely divorced form the risk being “insured.”  The young are being required to pay inflated prices for policies they do not need, generally do not want, and cannot afford solely and explicitly to pay for the depressed prices the old otherwise would pay.  Single men and empty nesters are being required to purchase prenatal and maternity coverage, children’s dental coverage, even contraceptive coverage (as if this commodity wants “insurance” coverage at all) so that women, in particular, and families generally, who might actually…benefit…from such policies can pay lower rates for them.  The list goes on.  This isn’t insurance, it’s naked wealth redistribution.  Even when there’s no wealth to redistribute.

“Getting most of the uninsured covered?”  That wasn’t the original promise; that started out being “all of the uninsured.”  Whether we wanted the insurance or not.  Aside from that, it’s not even coming close to getting all covered, because of Blinder’s third point:

Costs, of this health welfare program, anyway, are spiraling rapidly out of control.  The premiums available already are well documented to be in the two- and three-digit per centages higher—and that’s just for the premiums.  Deductibles are skyrocketing.  These are costs that have to be paid by the “insuree” before his coverage kicks in.  And it resets every year, while those premiums and the costs of being sick just keep on keepin’ on.

And there’s Blinder’s cynical non sequitur:

Millions of people under the age of 26 are already benefiting by being kept on their parents’ policies.

Yet,

To make universal coverage work, the government needs to bring [young people] into the insurance pool as counterweights to the high-risk people.

Meaning that millions of the young folks Obamacare so desperately needs to buy “insurance” so as to fund artificially low premiums for the rest aren’t buying “insurance;” they’re just jacking up the cost of their parents’ “insurance.”  How does that work, exactly, Alan?  How are these “millions of people under the age of 26” being brought “into the insurance pool as counterweights?”

And his bodice-rending closer:

[T]he status quo ante was so unacceptable.  America cannot be a humane society if we leave 15% of our population uninsured.  America cannot be an efficient society if we spend 50% to 100% more of our incomes on health care than other countries, and yet don’t get better health outcomes.  We can’t let a botched website get in the way of goals that big.

Unfortunately, Progressives like Blinder remain in the way, actively blocking market solutions and individual choice (we’re too stupid to be trusted with our own choices, remember) that actually would bring down the costs of true insurance on the one hand and the costs of health care on the other.  And leave a significant per centage of us without health insurance because that’s our choice.

Progressives Know Better

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President Barack Obama’s “fix” for his disastrous Obamacare and its ObamaMart store was intended to “allow” insurance companies to continue in force existing policies that are noncompliant with his Obamacare law.  I’ll leave aside the Constitutional aspects of his letter to states’ insurance commissioners “specifying that current plans sold to existing customers will not be considered out of compliance with the health care law in 2014[,]” even though most are, by Obamacare design, noncompliant.

The Progressives of the state of Washington have rejected Obama’s move, but for the wrong reasons.

Commissioner Mike Kreidler said on Thursday he won’t be allowing insurance companies to extend their old policies that didn’t meet the requirements of federal health care reform.

Kreidler, a Democrat, says all of them can get better coverage on the new health care exchange.  He says at least half of them will qualify for a subsidy to help them pay the premium.

This state’s Progressives Know Well that Washington’s single men and empty-nest couples need prenatal and maternity coverage.  And they need coverage to pay for the birth control that’s both a commodity and generally not needed, at least by those empty nesters.  This state’s Progressives Know Better what Washington’s citizens need than do those Washington citizens.  Especially since, by Kreidler’s own cynical admission, it won’t be Washington citizens’ money that’s paying a large portion of the added cost.

Kreidler’s move leaves some 290,000 Washingtonians stuck with ObamaMart’s poorer plans, which have higher premiums, albeit largely covered with OPM, and with higher deductibles, which won’t be covered with OPM.

Lies of my President, Revisited

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Recall President Barack Obama’s original lie, from mid-July 2009:

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor.  Period.  If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.  Period.

Then, when the insurance cancelation notices went out, and Obamacare “insurance” plans didn’t include our doctors in their networks, he lied about his lie.  He had this, for instance, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney:

What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide.  So it’s true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.

So it’s “If I like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor.  Maybe.  If I like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.  Maybe.”

Then he lied with his sham apology:

I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me.

No apology for either of his prior lies, just regret that all those folks took him at his word.

And Obama thought his lies were funny at the time he made them:

So after I signed the bill, I looked around to see if there any—(laughter)—asteroids falling or—(applause)—some cracks opening up in the Earth.  (Laughter.)  It turned out it was a nice day.  (Laughter.)  Birds were chirping.  Folks were strolling down the Mall.  People still have their doctors.

Five million Americans, and counting don’t have their health care plans, either.

After receiving a letter from her insurer that her plan was being discontinued, Deborah Persico…found a comparable plan on the city’s new health insurance exchange. But her monthly premium, now $297, would be $165 higher, and her maximum out-of-pocket costs would double.

That means she could end up paying at least $5,000 more a year than she does now.

She’s not alone.  In California alone,

Hundreds of thousands…who purchase their own health insurance are bracing to pay more for their plans, as the cost of the federal health care overhaul lands harder on middle-class customers.

The Daily Caller estimates that the total number of Americans about whom Obama is sorry for having believed him will run to 129 million.

Fifty-three Democrats and two Independents in the Senate actively supported Obama in these lies until the cancelations started rolling in.  Now some of those are worried, not about the losses of all these Americans, but about their own political necks.  Two hundred Democrats in the House Actively supported Obama in these lies until the cancelations started rolling in.  Now some of those are worried, not about the losses of all these Americans, but about their own political necks.

And now Obama wants—dishonestly, again—to change the Obamacare law (the law of the land, remember) by Executive Order to force insurance companies to reinstate all those cancelled policies and to extend existing ones.  For a whole year.

Remember that during primary and election season this summer and fall.