Category Archives: Health

Damning ObamaCare With Faint Praise

Even its supporters are struggling:

Wing and Young have set up quite a straw man, taking ObamaCare opponents’ most exaggerated fears and exaggerating them even further.

They set up a straw man on the other side of the debate as well. The article opens with the “concession” that “the Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect. . . . Like most laws, Obamacare never will be perfect.” (That “most” is a nice touch. One wonders if they have an example in mind of a law that is perfect.) But we don’t recall anyone promising that ObamaCare would be perfect. What Obama and his backers promised was that it would be very, very good–that it would provide “universal” (or nearly so) coverage while reducing costs and maintaining or improving the quality of medical care.

Now, however, Wing and Young dramatically scale back that promise, describing ObamaCare as an “ambitious reform effort meant to make a dent in the nearly 50 million Americans who currently lack health insurance.” Again, that’s a contradiction in terms: It was in fact “ambitious,” but it would not have been so if it meant only to “make a dent.”

This is all by way of setting a very low standard for evaluating ObamaCare, one that will ensure it will be judged a “success” as long as it doesn’t destroy America. But the meat of the article is actually an indictment of ObamaCare, at least if one applies a reasonable standard of asking whether on balance it is a good piece of legislation.

It’s not. It’s an awful piece of legislation, perhaps the worst in history. At least recent history. Which is no surprise, when you consider the manner in which it was passed.

Popcorn At The Movies

A history.

But here’s a question for paleo types. Yes, I know it’s a grain, and grains are bad, but it’s probably the least processed grain we eat. How bad is it, relatively?

Hmmmmm… [googling]

There seems to be a consensus that it’s definitely not paleo. But some say there are worse things if you’re going to cheat. I saw this one horror story, but I think that’s more a problem of the crap they put on it in the theater than the corn itself. I always pop it in butter, and put butter on it, but there are a lot of recommendations for coconut oil instead..

There are a lot of warnings (appropriately, I think) about the microwaved variety. I have to say, that I hadn’t realized how many paleos are anti-GMO. I think that’s taking it beyond eating healthy, and turning it into a religion.

Healthcare.Gov

What went wrong?

I imagine there was a dialogue last Monday afternoon that went something like this:

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Why does the username have to have a number in it?

BACK-END DEVELOPER: It’s in the government username regulations. Didn’t you read them?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: No, we don’t do accounts, we just hand the input to you.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: And we told you your front-end the input was no good! See the ErrEngineDown in the URL?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: Fine, fine. Sigh. Nice to finally talk to you, by the way.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: Yeah, you too. Are you in D.C.?

FRONT-END DEVELOPER: San Francisco.

BACK-END DEVELOPER: Know any good jobs in D.C.? I hate this place and they’re furloughing me as soon as we fix this mess.

Each group got its piece “working” in isolation and prayed that when they hooked them together, things would be okay. When they didn’t, it was too late. It is entirely possible that back-end developer CGI is primarily at fault here, but no one will care because they just see that the whole thing doesn’t work. As you learn early on in software development, there is no partial credit in programming. A site that half-works is worse than one that doesn’t work at all, which is why the bad error handling is so egregious. You always handle errors.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

[Update a few minutes later]

The roll out was nothing short of disastrous:

The left likes to flatter itself as thinking in terms of reason, facts, expertise, openness to doubt, and scorn of dogma and magical thinking.

Is this anywhere close to true?

When experts told the Obama Administration it was a fact the website was not ready, did they take seriously this advisement?

Nope! They simply said there was no cause for alarm; the strange gods of the left would just sort everything out.

Oddly enough, they didn’t.

It’s almost like they’re not quite as brilliant and rational as they’re always telling us they are.

And then there’s this. That’s right, Sheila Jackson Lee, who thinks that the Apollo astronauts went to Mars, thinks that the solution to the government shutdown is martial law. Meanwhile, the good lefties over at The Atlantic are more measured. They just want to have the Speaker of the House arrested.

It’s almost like they have a will to power, or something. And of course, as always with the left, when they accuse the “right” of this sort of thing, it’s projection.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, so just what are CGI Federal’s ties to the administration? You’d be a fool to think there are none.

ObamaCare’s Broken Promises

pile up:

To recap, then: Before, during, and after passage, Americans were promised that Obamacare was going to lower premiums for “everyone” (the goal of merely maintaining premiums being too modest); it was not going to interfere with anybody’s health care or health insurance if they already had it; and it was not going change anybody’s patient-doctor relationship. The message was unmistakable: All the government wanted to do was extend health insurance to people who didn’t have it. This wouldn’t affect you. No need to worry. Period. Move along.

In addition to the totally partisan nature of this thing, one of the other many things that distinguishes it from previous entitlements is the many grandiose lies that were told about it to sell it, going back to the president’s first campaign.

The Train Wreck

Why is ObamaCare such a hot steaming mess? Because Obama cares more about campaigning than governing (though he does like the part of governing where he can push his political enemies around).

[Update a while later]

The Republicans didn’t sabotage the health exchanges. Obama did.

This train wreck was perfectly predictable, and many predicted it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

It’s ObamaCar.

ObamaCar

[Update a while later]

USA Today
: “…an inexcusable mess.”

[Bumped]