Category Archives: Health

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

ObamaCare’s Million-Dollar Question

86 Comments

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.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

ObamaCare’s Useful Idiots

68 Comments

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.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

ObamaCare Supporters

36 Comments

…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.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The ObamaCare Train Wreck

8 Comments

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.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Perverse Incentives Of ObamaCare

14 Comments

Yes, by all means, you should earn less money:

This, right here, is the toxic essence of the welfare state. It’s already been proven over and over that for the lower classes, welfare incentivizes permanent dependence: Since one gets more money receiving a raft of federal entitlements than one would get earning a salary at a low-level job, it’s a rational economic decision to remain unemployed, on purpose. Which millions of Americans do, generation after generation, creating a permanent underclass that only consumes the common treasury without ever contributing anything to it.

What Obamacare does, as demonstrated by this eye-opening article, is bring the same economic disincentive to the middle class: It is now a rational economic decision for the average American to earn less money. And to earn less you must work less, and when you work less, you contribute less to the common good.

With people intentionally contributing less to the common good, there will be less federal money available to finance the subsidies (which are fiscally unaffordable even without this problem), leading to an unavoidable downward economic spiral for the entire nation.

That’s OK. Remember, the president told us that, at some point, you’ve earned enough money. He’s just lowering that point.

Business, Health, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Expensive ObamaCare Web Site

16 Comments

There is no good excuse for it:

From the evidence, it’s clear that the Obamacare exchange servers saw errors of all different kinds. They weren’t prepared for the load, even though this was never very heavy. California reported about 600,000 unique visitors, and Colorado reported about 55,000 unique visitors.

There were screen captures of database errors, not because the data was bad, but because the structure that holds the data was misdesigned.

There were 404 errors, which are totally design errors, meaning that the web sever was trying to get to a page that didn’t exist. (This led to the best hashtag of the day, #404care.)

There were non-descript server errors like the one I got from the California server.

There were user-interface errors. At about 10:00 AM, Colorado suspended new accounts on its site (it’s one of the ones using its own site, not the main exchange site), and didn’t get around to allowing new accounts again until 3:00 PM. At that point, the “New Account” button sent you to the login page for existing accounts. If you chose to enter your childhood phone number for a secret question, it wouldn’t take it, no matter what format (certainly not the format it used when asking for your current phone number).

This is why I say it was clear that this wasn’t just one of those things. The volume of inquiries wasn’t high by large-system standards, and the rest of the errors were in the control of the programmers.

These were design and execution errors, pure and simple. They were all catchable, with proper beta and load testing.

Yup.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Paleo Diet

11 Comments

Is it a fad? An interesting interview by Ben Domenech:

…the existing food movement that sprang up around organic food was largely driven by, particularly in the early years, the vegetarian world and the plant-based diet world, with a good bit of progressive ideology. And so that is alienating to a lot of people who might want to be healthier, who do care about where their food comes from. We saw the same thing happen in the environmental movement. You’ve got scores of hunters who care deeply about conservation and practice it in their own lives, and but due to differences in culture hunters have largely been excluded from the environmental movement.

I think there was a latent demand for an alternative approach to healthy eating and healthy living that wasn’t, that didn’t require you to buy in to all this other ideology. Because basically until paleo, until this general evolutionary approach came along, the only options were, you can be a sort of like a hippie vegan progressive, or you can eat tons of McDonalds and become obese and proudly tout that you don’t care where your food comes from, or you can go on some fad diet. And those aren’t actually very good options for a lot of people.

So, first I just think there was latent demand for it. And then there there’s definitely something to the fact that paleo doesn’t look down on eating meat and that definitely appeals to a slightly more masculine group of folks. The latest surveys have shown that paleo is actually split about 50/50 between men and women, but that’s far more men relative to all other dietary movements, which tend to be 70, 80% women. So, people will say it’s all macho, all these men are into it. It’s actually about 50/50, but it just feels a little bit more masculine relative to everything else.

It really has taken off more among libertarians than the general population, I think.