Category Archives: Health

The War On Saturated Fat

Is it time to end it?

Yes. Next question?

When you’ve lost the LA Times

[Update a few minutes later]

“When saturated fat got mixed up with the high sugar added to processed food in the second half of the 20th century, it got a bad name,” noted UC San Francisco pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig. On the question of which is worse — saturated fat or added sugar, Lustig added, “The American Heart Assn. has weighed in — the sugar many times over.”

Yes. Also, eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Two of the most damaging nutrition myths are that you get cholesterol build up from eating cholesterol, and you get fat from eating fat. Both are based on the primitive “you are what you eat” theory. Stop counting calories, eat things that are good for you (which include saturated fat) and avoid things that are bad (grains and sugar).

Seven “Solutions” To ObamaCare

…that won’t save it:

I don’t know how to fix the broken programming system. But I do know what sort of “fixes” could make the insurance market break further. If we’re going to delay, then we need to delay the whole thing — guaranteed issue, community rating and so forth. Otherwise, we’re just asking for, well, a quagmire.

They’re calling for a “surge,” without an exit strategy.

ObamaCare’s Million-Dollar Question

It’s actually a trillion-dollar question: Will enough young people sign up?

There’s another self-inflicted wound that could prove fatal. Since the ACA allows young people to stay on their parents’ health plans until they turn 26, the law dramatically shrinks the pool of healthy young customers whose overpayments on insurance are supposed to subsidize the middle aged beneficiaries of the law.

…All told, we wonder if Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and President Obama are as happy today about Obamacare as they were on the day the law was passed. Beyond that, everything that has happened since passage has confirmed our view that far from solving the problems facing American health care, this poorly drafted, poorly executed system makes the problem of health care reform both more urgent and more difficult.

One of the myriad idiocies about the law is that they let people stay on their parents’ plans until they’re twenty six. Why did these morons imagine that those people that they needed to sign up for their own insurance would do so? It was just part of an incoherent grab bag of goodies they stuffed into the bill to try to sell it to low-infos.

[Update a while later]

Don’t worry, GOP. ObamaCare will defund itself:

With only a small penalty for abstaining, the numbers for signing up not only don’t add up — they’re absurd. Here’s one of the supposedly attractive deals: “One option available only to people under 30 is a so-called catastrophic policy that kicks in after a $6,350 annual deductible. In Monroe County, you can buy that policy on the New York State of Health exchange for as low as $131 a month for single coverage.”

Over fifteen hundred a year for a sixty-three hundred plus deductible? What healthy thirty year old would waste his or her money?

Who invented this plan? Certainly not Obama or Pelosi, neither of whom was paying close attention, I would bet. (Pelosi admitted she wasn’t. All Obama wanted was something to put his name next to, something that sounded vaguely “progressive.”)

Neither Obama or Pelosi is smart enough to even understand the problem.

ObamaCare’s Useful Idiots

A round up.

Sadly, some of them inhabit this comments section.

[Update a while later]

The abysmal, pathetic ObamaCare roll out:

After the search for bin Laden, the Obama administration’s biggest manhunt has turned out to be for someone—anyone—who managed to actually sign up for and enroll in an insurance plan offered by the federal exchange. As The Miami Herald declared in a recent headline, “Obamacare enrollees become urban legend.” So far, you’ve got a better chance of turning up a gerbil escapee scurrying down Richard Gere’s leg than finding a couple dozen satisfied customers of healthcare.gov. During a legendarily awful Daily Show appearance, Sebelius lowered expectations yet further by saying that HHS will release enrollment figures on a monthly basis. Right after all the parades for record-setting grain harvests and successful launches of canine cosmonauts.

The first high-profile case of an Obamacare enrollee was paraded around the mainstream media like a captured U2 pilot in the old Soviet Union. But he turned out to be…well, not so much. On October 4, my colleague Peter Suderman broke the story that Obamacare poster boy Chad Henderson had not actually purchased insurance for either himself or his father. Henderson—a paid activist for Organizing for America, an outgrowth of the president’s re-election committee—eventually admitted to The Washington Post, “I have not purchased a specific plan.”

The broken web site didn’t help.

ObamaCare Supporters

…go through the stages of grief.

Somehow, being leftists, I don’t think they’ll ever get to acceptance. Bargaining’s as far as they’ll go, and then only to buy time until they can come up with a new strategy.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The disastrous roll out could spell doom. It certainly deserves it. And the Democrats deserve the accruing political fallout.

The ObamaCare Train Wreck

Thoughts from Richard Epstein.

Even its supporters are having trouble excusing it. Read this from Ezra Klein.

Hey, it’s not like this wasn’t perfectly predictable, and predicted.

[Update a while later]

Was the site crash caused by rate shock?

[Update a few minutes later]

Wow, even the New York Times is becoming racist:

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”

Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles.

It’s almost like these people think politics is more important than actually competently running the government.