In my native North Dakota, 35,000 people have lost or will be losing their insurance so far.
Against that, 30 have successfully signed up.
Hint to the national GOP; “hope for change” might be a good tack to take.
If you can actually offer either, naturally.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Obama repeatedly promised that if you like your insurance, you can keep it. Liberals now say he meant you could keep it if it met the requirements of the new law. What are those requirements?
The Affordable Care Act requires every health insurance policy to cover 10 essential categories of services, with details to be approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The essential health benefits package must cover the following general categories of services:
Ambulatory patient services
Emergency services
Hospitalization
Maternity and newborn care
Mental health and substance abuse disorder services, including behavioral health treatment
Prescription drugs
Rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices
Laboratory services
Preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management
Pediatric services, including oral and vision care
Policies that didn’t include all those coverages are being dropped by insurance companies. People are being offered more expensive replacement policies that cover all the services.
Dog Gone echos the new Liberal lie, saying the old policies were “junk policies,” being replaced by newer, better policies, so they’re worth the increased premium.
My wife and I are in our late 50’s. Our children are in their 30’s. We have no need of maternity and newborn care. We have no need of pediatric services. 20% of the policy coverages do us no good but are included in the premiums. Adding more bells and whistles that I cannot use does not add value and does not make the policy worth the extra premium.
Lies, to justify Lies, to explain Lies, to cover up Lies. My grandmother used to say “For shame, for shame, all the dogs in town know your name.”
I’m glad she’s not here to see this.
And she were, she’d be paying for well child visits on her plan…
Obama apologizes for loss of heath plans…
…that, last week, were “junk plans” that we’re better off without?
What Obama Said: “If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor (and 22 variations thereunto).
What Obama Didn’t Say: “Doctor, schmoctor. You might not even be able to keep your spouse“.
October 14: delaying the individual mandate is “sedition”.
October 28: delaying the individual mandate was always a good idea, Winston.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Obama famously promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under the Affordable Care Plan.
Well, you can keep him IF he joins the new plan. He doesn’t have to. And many won’t. So here’s your shiny new Obama-care card. Now go try to use it.
Also, Obama-care will save money, Congress will have the same deal as we, and Gitmo will be closed.
Joe Doakes
We’ll have hope, along with all of that change…
Death Panels don’t exist Death Panels always existed, citizen. And They are a wonderful thing!
(Note to anyone who’s ever worked in health insurance: you know that Death Panels have existed for decades. It’s called “Care Management”, and HMOs have been doing them since the seventies or eighties. And while the linked article relates to Canada, Obamacare is no different. I present this mainly as an academic exercise, so you can see if your lefty friends start changing the spin they put out…)
Exhibit A:
Glad we could clarify that.
A lot of my readers, like me, work in IT.
And if you’re in the Twin Cities and are in the IT contracting community, you may well have heard the rumblings from the Minnesota Health Insurance Exchange project, either at hire time or from people involved in the development process.
Capsule Summary: It’s been a Bulgarian Goat Rodeo.
And it reflects how things have been going in most every other state involved in the Obamacare Exchanges, and of course at the Federal level.
Megan McArdle breaks down the federal registration site meltdown at a level that’ll make sense to all of you bit-chasers and code-monkeys out there.
To me, the UX guy?
That’ll be worth a post on its own.
I don’t care if it is a Photoshop. In fact, it’s almost too good not to be.
I don’t care. It may be the ultimate metaphor for Obamacare’s rollout.
And you too, MNCare!
Here’s Cam Winton’s website. You don’t have to live in Minneapolis to help Cam shock the world.
Here’s my piece about Daniel Henninger’s piece saying we should just let Obamacare collapse from its unwieldy incompetence.
And since it was “Springsteen Cover Saturday” in honor of Bruce’s 64th birthday last Monday – here’s my series on why Springsteen resonates with conservatives.
The political battle against Obamacare failed. Twice, actually – in the ’08 and ’12 elections. And it’s going to fail again; the Senate and the President will likely succeed in blocking any effort to defund it, if by no other means than calling in markers from their praetorian guard in the media to make sure any shutdown is catastrophic to the GOP.
Which will blink.
Dan Henninger says the time has come to exploit Obamacare’s key weakness; Obamacare:
As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called “ObamaCare” carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.
If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.
I just finished watching Ken Burns’ Prohibition – which is all about how big social engineering goes terribly awry when it runs into contact with social reality.
I don’t like indulging in historical parallels – they’re seductive drugs that convey little real knowledge. But Obamacare is one of the greatest social engineering measures ever attempted – and “great social engineering” is almost invariably a synonym for “failure”.
Obamacare hasn’t even been fully inflicted, and it’s already a disaster.
Maybe the best thing that can happen is to have the American people look all of that Hope and Change in the face, and take it.
They asked for it, after all.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Complaints about how the Obamacare Outreach contracts were awarded.
The complainers’ logic escapes me: only Blacks can reach out to to other Blacks to give them free stuff, they won’t accept it from Whites? Or do you fear White Minnesota Democrats are 1963 racists who will intentionally exclude Blacks from the free stuff, Jim-Crow style? Is this about race at all, or is it about who gets the taxpayer-funded make-work job?
———-
Obama says bombing Syria will prevent Assad from using chemical weapons again, which will deter everybody else from acquiring and using them, which makes our own children safer in the long run.
Condensed version: bomb Syria, for the children.
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New “study” proves federally funded early childhood education programs will save Minnesota 4.8 billion in prison costs.
Look for details on this – Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom is involved so we know it’s anti-gun.
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A guy with a sawed-off shotgun arrested in Burnsville.
You see, this is why we need universal background checks, to prevent guys like this from carrying sawed-off shotguns into banks and convenience stores. Because although he’s already a career criminal who ignored half-a-dozen laws to commit this crime, he’ll surely obey the next law. Or the one after that. Or the one . . . .
———-
So is that too many dead eagles, or not enough? How many dead eagles is too many dead eagles, if the goal is to achieve energy independence? You want green energy or not?
———-
Car bomb explodes on 9/11 outside building formerly used as US Consulate in Benghazi.
It’s empty (except for FBI investigators still trying to figure out what happened there a year ago when a bunch of film critics chased us away) so no important American officials killed this time. But bombs are used to send a message (see: Johnson in Vietnam, Obama in Syria). The message Al Qaeda sent with this bomb: “And don’t come back!”
Joe Doakes
“Hit the road, Barack”.
An Obamacare call center will not offer benefits.
From the National Review’s Eliana Johnson at NRO. She’s the daughter of Powerline’s Scott Johnson, and is rapidly becoming one of the best conservative journalists out there.
——–
CORRECTION: It’s not the Obamacare federal call center. It’s a state center.
It’s still like rain on your wedding day and such, but still.
Aetna and UHG exit the individual health insurance market in California, rather than deal with the mandates in Obamacare’s California exchange.
The change will affect about 50,000 individual subscribers (which, when you tack on family members, stretches out to around 150,000 people.
And and it’s a sample of what’s going to happen in most other states, as private insurers, looking at expensive coverage mandates and limited revenue, dump out of the private coverage business.
Exactly as conservatives said.
He who laughs last laughs loudest – although this kind of laughing isn’t that funny.
Unprecendented shortage of trace elements is killing people, especially children.
The shortage traces back to the Obamacare bureaucracy.
If you haven’t read this yet – and it’s been circulating for the past week or so – then get on it.
Then we’ll have a conversation about why things like school massacres happen, and what we can do about it.
Over at MPR, Tom Scheck brings us the latest DFL chanting point; the “links” between two GOP legislators (Rep. Gottwalt and Sen. Hann) who pushed a healthcare privatization bill in the last session, and the insurance industry.
State Rep. Steve Gottwalt, R-St. Cloud, led the GOP effort to cut spending in the state’s Health and Human Services budget when the Republicans controlled the Legislature. Now, both he and his Senate counterpart [Hann] have business links to the insurance industry, which has some other lawmakers asking whether the arrangement violates ethics rules.
This is a chanting point that the DFL’s been working up for a while here. The DFL’s beef is that…
…some Democratic lawmakers are raising questions about the arrangement.
“I can see why the owner of the business was pushing for the bill. It’s more business for him,” said Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville. “The fact that [Gottwalt] is now working for him, I’m disappointed in that.”
Health insurance brokers backed the legislation, championed by Gotttwalt’s counterpart in the other chamber, state Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie.
The incoming chairman of the House ethics committee, Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth, said: “If these are payoffs, then the ethics committee needs to look at it.”
And if there are not payoffs – and there aren’t – then will Huntley, Marty, and the idiot leftyblogger chanting point bots apologize to Hann and Gottwalt?
Read Scheck’s piece for the details.
But I have a few questions, here:
Who else are you going to have working on healthcare finance policy? A bunch of lawyers and social workers? Who knows the financial side of the healthcare industry better than people who, y’know, work on the financial side of the healthcare industry?
Aren’t we cherrypicking the outrage we choose to feed to the media, DFL? Shouldn’t we bar teachers from committees on education appropriations? . Union activists oughtta be at least recusing themselves from votes on Right to Work and unionizing daycare and personal care workers! Do we want lawyers writing laws? And don’t be trying to hide, there, Erin Murphy; I’m told you were the executive director of a nursing lobby group, and became the ranking DFLer on the Healthcare Committee. Or Ryan Winkler, who is employed (heh) at Ted Mondale’s government-data-mining software company, sounding off about legislation that’d involve another data-mining company?
Of course, the DFL finds these kinds of non-corrupt “corruption” all the time, while practicing it themselves.
If only we had some institution – maybe with printing presses and transmitters, and people whose job it was to run down little facts like this? Perhaps those people working for that institution could think of themselves as a holy, truth-seeking monastic order? Call themselves “high priests of gatekeeping”, perhaps?
Just a thought.
By the way – lost in the contrived, DFL-agenda-driven “hubbub”: the program that Gottwalt and Hann developed has been a huge improvement for the Minnesotans it was intended to serve. “Healthy Minnesota” gives its participants vouchers enabling them to buy a standard insurance plan on the open market; it’s cheaper than UCare, and the participants get better, more personally-focused coverage than provided by the state. There are gaps – every insurance plan has ’em – but it was, as advertised, a huge improvement over UCare at lower cost.
In other words, it’s a government program that does what it’s supposed to do, and saves money to boot.
But “big business” is invovled, and that thought apparently gives DFLers explosive diarrhea.
Dr. Peter Weiss on the scam of Obamacare’s “Free Annual Examination”:
I have now posted a notice in my office and each exam room stating exactly what Obamacare will cover for those yearly visits. Remember Obama promised this as a free exam — no co-pay, no deductible, no charge. That’s fine and dandy if you are healthy and have no complaints. However, we are obligated by law to code specifically for the reason of the visit. An annual exam is one specific code; you can not mix this with another code, say, for rectal bleeding. This annual visit covers the exam and “discussion about the status of previously diagnosed stable conditions.” That’s the exact wording under that code — insurance will not cover any new ailment under that code.
If you are here for that annual exam, you will not be covered if you want to discuss any new ailment or unstable condition. I cannot bait and switch to another code — that’s illegal. We, the physicians, are audited all the time and can lose our license for insurance fraud.
You, the patient, will then have to make a decision.
Do you want your “free” yearly exam, or do you want to pay for a visit which is coded for a particular, new problem? You can have my “free” exam if you only discuss what Obamacare wants me to discuss… If you are complaining of a new problem, then you have to reschedule, since Obamacare is very clear as to what is covered and what is not. Obamacare — intentionally — makes it as difficult to be seen and taken care of as possible.
It really is as cynical as its proponents always called Big Insurance.
Hey, who needs a “death panel” if people die waiting on an appointment?
A few quick facts:
So who’s going to be the big loser when the Democrats take control (Control! Of womens’ health!) of healthcare, and – inevitably – need to ratchet up the rationing?
Come on, be honest. Don’t you want the federal government to have a complete overview of health care? The potential rationality is stunning. And one thing in this emerging rationality is clear: Although women tend to love the notion of government control more than men do, it is women who will be told they’ll have to cut back. On treatments. And years. You know we’ve been taking more than our share.
Read the whole thing.
And remember the example whenever libs start yapping about people voting “against their own best interests”.
Obamacare won’t raise taxes on the middle class!
Just on big bad businesses, usually owned by “the 1%”!
And they’ll just eat those taxes, right?
Well, no – in a number of senses, you will.
Read this excellent piece in the PiPress and figure it out for yourselves.
It does not look good.
Years ago, my old friend Moonbeam Birkenstock – who is much farther left than I am to the right – announced, with great noise and fury, that he was through paying the portion of his taxes to the Feds that went to defense.
“I refuse to contribute to the US military, which exists only to murder children and bomb innocent people” bellowed Birkenstock as we talked at a party.
I grinned a smug grin, pulled a pocket-sized copy of the US Tax Code from my pocket, and announced “You are teh LIER!!! Nowhere in the IRS Tax code can you find a single reference to rifles or bombers or bombs or any sort of military hardware at all!”.
Moonbeam pulled a can of mace and gave me a long, wet blast in the face. And as I coughed and hacked and wiped tears from my eyes, I knew I deserved it.
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Eric Austin is a liberal blogger from somewhere in central Minnesota. We’ve run into him before – in one case, admitting in an audio passage that he condoned the bullying of the child of a conservative legislator because, in his words (seriously – follow the link and listen to the audio, if you can stomach it – it may be one of the most vile, reprehensible things I’ve ever heard) her mother had voted against a bill making bullying gay kids extra special illegal.
But that was then. This is now. Perhaps Austin’s rhetoric has improved with time and maturity?
Local conservative layabout, Gary Gross, has been churning out quite a few posts since the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act is, in fact, Constitutional. Any one of those posts could be the subject of another episode of Gross Inaccuracies but who has the time to keep up with a single childless unemployed blogger who lives off the government he loathes.
OK, ixnay on the whole “improvement” and “maturity” thing, I’d say I’m curious how Mr. Austin thinks this sort of ugly, personal name-calling advances his, or any, argument…
…but I’m not curious. It’s easy. The fact is, it’s incredibly easy for Minnesota liberals to grow to what passes for “adulthood” these days – through their feminized public schools, a university system that marginalizes and expunges conservative dissent from the dominant narrative, and a media that accepts liberalism as the baseline for good and, via its leading figure Jon Stewart, “snark” as its main rhetorical cudgel – without having the foggiest idea how to debate a conservative, or even what real civilized debate is.
Which is why most liberals’ “arguments” start with ad hominem and tu quoque (“Look! My opponent said or did something that is inconsistent with something else he says or does! That invalidates his entire argument!”) and proceed through…
…well…
Today’s episode of Gross Inaccuracies concerns the most ludicrous of these most recent posts about how terribly awfully no good it is to now have Romneycare (oops, I mean Obamacare). Gross fawns over an exchange on Fox News between Sarah Palin and the token Democrat on the show about how there really are DEATH PANELS in the Affordable Care Act.
Here is the relevant part of the exchange from Palin:
There’s a faceless bureaucratic panel and the acronym is the IPAB and the I-P-A-B, what that will be is that is a board that will tell you, Bob, whether your level of productivity in society is worthy of receiving the rationed care that will be the result of Obamacare.
Now there is a board called the Independent Payment Advisory Board but its purpose isn’t anywhere close to what Palin suggests. The duty of the board is to find ways to keep Medicare spending from growing out of control. However, one of its provisions specifically states that it may not recommend “rationing” care.
Right. So – like my friend Moonbeam Birkenstock in the example at the top of this post, Palin has completely botched the entire factual basis of the argument…
…well, no. She has assigned a role to one piece of the bureaucracy that will be practiced by another piece of the bureaucracy. It might be a government agency, or as Austin notes from the mandate tax law…
From the Affordable Care Act:
‘‘(ii) The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums under section 1818, 1818A, or 1839, increase Medicare beneficiary cost- sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria. [emphasis mine]
So what this means – if you accept it at face value – is that the law will not deal, in and of itself, with rationing. That can is being kicked down the road.
Which brings us to a key fact of this debate, one that Obama and Obamacare’s supporters either don’t know or don’t want you to know. It’s true that there will likely never be a room somewhere in northern Virginia with a brass plate on the door engraved with the title “Death Panel Conference Room”, and that nobody in whatever bureaucracy takes over Obamacare will have “Death Panelist” on their job description.
But in modern health care insurance parlance, the term you look for is “Case Management” (sometimes “Care Management”). The term was spawned in the eighties, in the HMO industry, to cover the intersection of insurance, medicine and actuarial science. And it’s the part of the health care insurance industry that goes through the utterly rational process of answering the question “if we have one transplantable liver, do we give it to the 43 year old guy with the curable degenerative enzyme disorder whose productive life expectancy will be increased by (on the average) ten years, or do we give it to the 70 year old chain-smoking diabetic alcoholic who has already run past her life expectancy given her current state of health”
To the 43 year old who gets the liver, it’s how the system works. I suspect to the family of the 70 year old, the body that made that decision could be viewed as a “death panel”.
The facts, however, are…:
While Palin continues to use a lie that has been repeatedly debunked by fact checking organizations and was even named the Lie of the Year by one,
Not by “one” – by “Politifact”, which has been pretty well shown (via the “Lie of the Year” canard and some even more egregious episodes) to be less a “fact checking” organization and more a Democrat propaganda mill.
Austin takes issue with Gross’ explanation of the various bureaucratic roles involved, and reaches some conclusion:
Let’s take a couple things here, Gary. First, the Independent Payment Advisory Board doesn’t look at any “individuals” but rather looks at the Medicare system as a whole and it explicitly states in its mission that it shall not recommend “rationing” health care. Second, the phrase “quality adjusted life years” is not used ANYWHERE in the Affordable Care Act.
This, Austin calls a “lie”. At the most, of course, it’s an “error” – “Lying” requires some intent to deceive.
And, like my friend Moonbeam at the top of the story, the only immediate error (or, if you’re a liberal talking about a conservative, “lie”) is in mixing up different layers of administrators.
Sophistic niggling about different layers of the bureaucracy is the kind of thing that sends tingles up law students and bureaucracy-nerds’ legs. But in terms of the actual effect of Obamacare on real people, they’re all distinctions without differences. They are all parts of a system that will, inexorably, lead to increased shortage, hiked costs and diminished availability.
Which will be arbitrated by some body, somewhere.
And you can call it a “Case Management Process”, a “Death Panel”, or a “Happy Time Commission” for all anyone cares. The result in terms that real people, real taxpayers, care about is always, and can only be, the same.
And with those immutable facts in place, I suppose responding to dissent with snark and ad-hominem is better, to some, than just admitting you’re wrong and addressing that whole “why do you promote the bullying of children?” thing.
The biggest burden of Obamacare – one of the biggest entitlement programs in US history – will be borne by middle class taxpayers.
The “99%”. Or rather, the half of the 99% that pay taxes, and maybe then some.
The left will try to divert this, saying that the penalty for not buying insurance is, in and of itself, not the biggest tax increase in history. And they’re right.
But it’s not the only tax that Obamacare imposes, and imposes squarely on the middle, entrepreneurial and working classes.
Gary Gross notes that Obamacare is a 21 tax salute for Minnesotans:
That includes a job-killing (or at least job-deferring, which if your’e unemployed is the same as a job kill) .9% addition to the payroll tax to pay for Obamacare, as well as a tax on dividends.
All of which, let us not forget, defiers the one thing that actually can help America get on top of the heath care crisis – job creation and recovery from the Obama recession!
From SCOTUSBlog’s liveblog of the Obamacare decision:
The money quote from the section on the mandate: Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.
And so like any other unjust or intrusive tax, we need to aboliish it.
If this isn’t the call to wake up, organize Republicans and get to the polls to vote airtight straight tickets for conservatives who wijll win, and who will go to Washington focused like laser beams on expunging Obamacare, then nothing is, and this nation is doomed.
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