As she says, it’s ludicrous to expect a completely predictable and routine expense to be covered by insurance. It’s all about rousing up the troops in the fake “war on women.”
Category Archives: Health
Obama Approval
It’s fallen to fifty percent in his home state, and he’s deep underwater in Ohio.
The Bacon Explosion
No, Mark, bacon and sausage don’t cause coronaries and strokes. #NutritionalIgnorance
The Bad-Faith Presidency
If he were awoken at 3 a.m. and told he had to make the case for nationalizing the banks by denying he was nationalizing the banks, he would do an entirely creditable job of it, even without a TelePrompTer. The salesmanship for Obamacare represents in microcosm the larger Obama political project, which has always depended on throwing a reassuring skein of moderation on top of left-wing ideological aims.
All politicians are prone to shaving the truth, giving themselves the benefit of the doubt and trying to appear more reasonable than they are. Obama has made it an art form. Bad faith is one of his signal strengths as a politician, and makes him one of the greatest front men progressivism has ever had.
He will never admit his deep bias toward the growth of the federal government for its own sake, or that he doesn’t care that much if Iran gets the bomb, or that he is liquidating the American leadership role in the Middle East. No, no—he is just trying to make government work, giving diplomacy a chance and pivoting to Asia, respectively.
It’s a shame more people didn’t catch on the the con last year.
ObamaCare As A Cost Cutter
Another Legal Blow Against ObamaCare?
SCOTUS is going to take up the religious freedom issue.
I suspect they’ll come down on the side of Hobby Lobby. The real question is whether or not they’ll say it’s severable, or if Roberts decides to fix his previous screwup.
The Starship Enterprise
ObamaCare isn’t one:
The technocratic idea is that you put a bunch of smart, competent people in government — folks who really want the thing to work — and they’ll make it happen. But “smart, competent people” are not a generic quantity; they’re incredibly domain-specific. Most academics couldn’t run a lemonade stand. Most successful entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to muster the monomaniacal devotion needed to get a Ph.D. Neither group produces many folks who can consistently generate readable, engaging writing on a deadline. And none of us would be able to win a campaign for Congress.
Yet in my experience, the majority of people in these domains think that they could do everyone else’s job better, if they weren’t so busy with whatever it is they’re doing so well. It’s the illusion of omnicompetence, and in the case of HealthCare.gov, it seems to have been nearly fatal.
Remember, Obama was a better speech writer than his speech writers, knew policy better than his policy advisors, would make a better chief of staff than his chief of staff. He is the Dunning-Kruger effect personified.
ObamaCaliforniaCare
As is noted there, Krugman told us Enron was working fine, too.
23 And Me
I think that the FDA is a much greater danger to public health than DNA testing. It needs to be reined in.
Politicians And Technology
Why they don’t know how to deal with technical messes:
All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren’t dumb. But they come from a background — law and politics — where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.
What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don’t is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there’s no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.
When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.
Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can’t even launch a website.
Of course, they ignore economic reality as well.