{"id":55994,"date":"2015-11-06T06:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-11-06T12:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55994"},"modified":"2019-10-30T07:04:42","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T12:04:42","slug":"crawling-from-the-wreckage-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55994","title":{"rendered":"Crawling From The Wreckage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By every rational measure, Obamacare is a complete failure &#8211; a fraternity-rush-week\u00a0of terrible assumptions and economic ignorance that have turned a sixth of this nation&#8217;s economy into a hapless dumpster fire.<\/p>\n<p>Kevin Williamson takes stock of the failures &#8211; and, in this notable passage, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/426550\/obamacare-failures\">breaks down the &#8220;why&#8221; of how we got here<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The architects of Obamacare are deeply distrustful of the role of for-profit companies in the health-care business because, in their nearly pristine ignorance, they falsely believe profits to be net deductions from the sum of the public good rather than measures of the creation of real social value. So they created incentives to set up co-ops, nonprofit enterprises that would administer Obamacare plans in particular states and jurisdictions. It was obvious from the beginning that if Obamacare\u2019s perverse incentives created insurance pools that were older and sicker rather than younger and healthier, these co-ops wouldn\u2019t be economically viable: You need lots of young, healthy insurance subscribers to offset the costs associated with your older, sicker subscribers. Many of us \u2014 myself included \u2014 assumed that the federal government under President Obama would simply write these co-ops huge checks to keep them afloat. We were half right: The government is writing them huge checks, but they are failing anyway, so fundamental is their economic unsustainability. Half of the co-ops have gone belly-up already, including large, prominent, splendidly subsidized ones in Kentucky, New York, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Hundreds of thousands of customers have lost their coverage as a result. Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers\u2019 money has been poured into these enterprises, to no avail. Almost all of Obamacare\u2019s basic promises have failed, it is an economic shambles, and it is a political mess .<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Obamacare\u2019s partisans were confronted with the economic facts long before the law was even passed, and their answer was: \u201cNever mind the economics, we\u2019re the good guys, and you want poor people to die.\u201d Democrats argued that Republicans literally wanted to kill poor people, that their plan was for the poor to \u201cdie quickly.\u201d This is a habitual mode of discourse among progressives: Reality doesn\u2019t matter; only the purity of Democrats\u2019 motives matters. Obamacare is what it is: Another damned five-year plan based on wishful thinking and very little else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n<p>And if you haven&#8217;t read Williamson&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/redirect\/amazon.p?j=0062220683\"><em>The End Is Near, And It&#8217;s Going To Be Awesome<\/em>, get out to Amazon and do it<\/a>. \u00a0Now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By every rational measure, Obamacare is a complete failure &#8211; a fraternity-rush-week\u00a0of terrible assumptions and economic ignorance that have turned a sixth of this nation&#8217;s economy into a hapless dumpster fire. Kevin Williamson takes stock of the failures &#8211; and, in this notable passage, breaks down the &#8220;why&#8221; of how we got here: The architects [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,311],"tags":[289],"class_list":["post-55994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-mnsure-debacle","tag-kevin-williamson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55994","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=55994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55995,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55994\/revisions\/55995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}