{"id":47257,"date":"2014-09-17T12:15:15","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T17:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=47257"},"modified":"2014-09-17T11:45:59","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T16:45:59","slug":"lowballed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=47257","title":{"rendered":"Lowballed"},"content":{"rendered":"

SCENE:\u00a0 At the Mississippi Market co-op in Saint Paul.\u00a0 Mitch BERG is shopping for steel-cut oatmeal.\u00a0 He notices Avery LIBRELLE turning into his aisle, looking for free-range humane tofu.\u00a0 He tries to turn and leave, but it’s already too late.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Hey, Merg!\u00a0 The Free Market is collapsing!<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Er, OK – how do you figure?<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Preferred One left the MNSure network!<\/p>\n

BERG: Um, that’s not a failure of the free market.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0Sure it is!\u00a0 They came into the plan with a low-ball proposal.\u00a0 It didn’t work, so it’s a failure of the free market!\u00a0<\/p>\n

BERG: Well, no.\u00a0 It’s not.\u00a0 The plans they’re pulling from MNSure are basically the same thing they’ve been selling to employers for decades, although more expensive, to cover all the extra Obamacare requirements, and a little extra to cover the fact that they’d only get paid after the money filtered through the MNSure system, which just isn’t working.\u00a0 It’s the kind of plan they can sell by themselves just fine, and keep themselves in business.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Well, businesses shouldn’t profit from healthcare!<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Preferred One is a non-profit under Minnesota law.\u00a0\u00a0 And even so, they couldn’t financially justify the overhead that the MNSure system brought into the equation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 They should have come to the market with a plan that asked for more money!\u00a0 Government subsidies would cover it anyway!<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 And you have just explained why government subsidies promote inflation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 No I didn’t.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Yes you did.\u00a0 Businesses should raise their prices to smooth out dealing with the government’s incompetent bureaucracy, because another part of government is going to subsidize the transaction – which prices the business’s service out of reach of the unsubsidized.\u00a0 It’s done for health insurance exactly what it’s done for higher education.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 That just means we need single payer healthcare.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 So the same government that can’t produce a health care exchange <\/em>on time and on budget, and get payments to providers\u00a0efficiently enough to make the service worth providing,\u00a0will now be directly in charge of every facet of your healthcare.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Well, at least it’ll promote transparency.\u00a0<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 How so?\u00a0<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 See the social justice that the IRS brought to political campaigning by denying teabagger groups their tax-exempt status?\u00a0 Imagine the transparency we’ll get when The People can start denying them healthcare!<\/p>\n

(LIBRELLE turns, starts walking away, but walks into shelf full of jars of organic peanut butter.\u00a0 LIBRELLE falls as shelves of jars fall to the floor<\/em>)<\/p>\n

(And SCENE<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SCENE:\u00a0 At the Mississippi Market co-op in Saint Paul.\u00a0 Mitch BERG is shopping for steel-cut oatmeal.\u00a0 He notices Avery LIBRELLE turning into his aisle, looking for free-range humane tofu.\u00a0 He tries to turn and leave, but it’s already too late.\u00a0 LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Hey, Merg!\u00a0 The Free Market is collapsing! BERG:\u00a0 Er, OK – how do you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,66,2],"tags":[236],"class_list":["post-47257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-14","category-health-care","category-minnesota-politics","tag-dramatization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47257"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47260,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47257\/revisions\/47260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}