Tag Archives: responsibilities

Delays

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The House Republicans were forced to cancel yesterday’s scheduled American Health Care Act vote.  The Freedom Caucus, the Caucus of No, couldn’t be satisfied.  Congressmen like Jim Jordan (R, OH) and Caucus of No Chairman Mark Meadows (R, NC) refused late compromises, all the while insisting by implication from their refusals that constituents of other Congressmen, for instance Tom Cole (R, OK), worked for them and not that Cole worked for his Oklahoma constituents—and that those Oklahoma constituents might have different imperatives than those Congressmen of the Caucus.  So, no compromise from the No-ers.

Even after regulation changes that were part of Phase II of the overall three phase repeal and replace plan were offered to be brought into this Phase I AHCA, the No-ers refused.  Never mind that even the need to make such an offer displayed a monumental distrust by the No-ers of their ex-Congressional colleague, Tom Price, now Secretary of Health and Human Services and the gentleman who would have carried out those regulation rescissions of Phase II.  Even the No-ers’ plaint that they wanted those regulation removals written into law rather than merely rescinded makes no sense: that could have been legislated next year, by this same Congress, and that, as change to a done, deal would have thereby much easier to do.

Nor did a single member of the Caucus of No offer either any plan for getting the changed bill past a Senate filibuster from these too-large changes or any explanation of why their demanded changes would have permitted the bill still to go through via reconciliation and a majority-only vote.

It’s clear that the Freedom Caucus, this Caucus of No, is little more than a collection of yapping porch dogs, or alternatively just a bunch of right-handed virtue-signaling snowflakes, with little interest in actually improving our health provision system or restoring our health care to us constituents and our doctors.

Obamacare Replacement

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One aspect of the plan on offer in the House is this:

…whether it includes enough reform to arrest the current death spiral in the individual insurance market.

Notably, the bill includes a new 10-year $100 billion “stability fund” that allows states to start to repair their individual insurance markets. Before ObamaCare, it wasn’t inevitable that costs would increase by 25% on average this year, or that nearly a third of US counties would become single-insurer monopolies. With better policy choices, states can make coverage cheaper and more attractive for consumers and coax insurers back into the market, and the stability fund is a powerful tool.

Right idea, but it needs a tweak.  As with all Federal transfers to the States (even though nearly all of them do not have this), this transfer needs a sunset (ideally, but not as a deal breaker, on a declining balance to the sunset date) by which the transfer will cease to exist.  States need time to adjust their budgets as their addiction to Federal money is broken, but in the end the costs a State inflicts on itself must be the sole responsibility of that State.

Then there’s this:

The larger goal is to start to restore the traditional state regulatory authority over health insurance that ObamaCare supplanted for federal control. Local governments understand local needs best. With more flexibility, autonomy and accountability, the GOP hope is that reform Governors can pry open markets and help promote a larger and more dynamic business.

The larger goal still, and an even better one, should be to reduce regulation altogether to a great degree, and let the markets regulate health insurance products and costs.

In the end, too, local governments do understand local needs better than remote Federal, and State, governments.  But the greatest understanding is even more local: the patient and his doctor.  These are the participants in a free market for health insurance products—nation-wide and freely crossing State borders—whose “regulatory” activities should prevail.

Internet of Things

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…and default passwords.  Default passwords are foolish in any device, but here’s a particularly failing example.  A laundromat in Colorado had a security camera connected to the Internet (as is typical of security cameras), and it began hosting a particularly malicious bit of malware.

Bill Knapp, owner of Security Solutions LLC, whose firm installed the laundromat’s surveillance system, which included the security camera:

One of the hardest parts of this business is that everyone loses their passwords[.]

And when the camera manufacturer was called upon to reset the password, it could only reset it to the default password, which is well-known, as that’s how the consumer gets in to set up his system—which should include resetting the default password to an individual, hard-to-break one.

Steve McGregory, a researcher at security firm Ixia, about poorly secured devices:

Within nine seconds of turning on these things, they get hit[.]

There’s a hint there.

Republican Gadflies

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Karl Rove talked about health care coverage prospects in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, and that triggered a thought in my pea brain.

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) has announced that the House plan on offer, a plan designed to be passable through reconciliation, with later phases of repeal and replace for completing the task, is dead on arrival, and the House shoe start over and produce a more comprehensive plan in this first phase.  But Cotton has chosen to not offer a plan of his own, or outline what a plan acceptable to him would look like other than to address taxes and to more fully repeal right damn now Obamacare, or even to offer the tactics he’d use to get the new plan—which could not be done through reconciliation—past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) similarly demands a broader bill right damn now, but he, too, has chosen to offer no tactics for getting his bill past a Senate Progressive-Democrat filibuster.  He’s just using the copout excuse that that’s the Senate’s problem.  Oh, and Jordan also declines to identify the value of a bill that can’t be passed.

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) at least has offered an actual plan, but he, too, has declined to identify how he expects to get his plan past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

These gadflies keep demanding that everyone else put up (these three’s demands) or shut up.  It’s time these three put up; otherwise, they’re just porch dogs, yapping from the safety of their stoops.

Multitasking

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Whatever happened to it?

I’m reading between the lines on a Wall Street Journal op-ed from the weekend.

While the press corps chases accusations of Russian-Trump election collusion and illegal Obama Administration wiretaps, few noticed the Pentagon’s first public confirmation last week that the Kremlin is violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).

The specific problem that seems to have escaped NLMSM notice is this:

General Paul Selva, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that Russia has deployed a land-based cruise missile that violates the “spirit and intent” of that arms pact. “The system itself presents a risk to most of our facilities in Europe and we believe that the Russians have deliberately deployed it in order to pose a threat to NATO and to facilities within the NATO area of responsibility,” General Selva told the House Armed Services Committee.

Even the process of developing of this system is an INF violation.

Used to be folks could do more than one thing at a time.  Walk and chew gum, for instance.  Or write news articles about two different subjects and figure out how to put them on the same front page.

Or maybe this lack is a measure of the depth of the NLMSM’s TDS affliction.