Response to "Obamacare 2"

JRB,

Good to hear from you again, as always!  Don't worry -- I totally forgive you for the incendiary nature of your polemics.  (Okay, so maybe I slide into polemics too, every now and then, haha).  You are right, opinions can change as life unfolds.  (It's never too late, you know!)  I would be quite religious and conservative today if I couldn't change my mind.  Let me know when you start trying to persuade me.

By the way, may I make a suggestion?  Your post title needs a subtitle.  I was thinking along the lines of "Obamacare 2:  Blood Harvest".  Or maybe "Obamacare 2:  Rise of the Machines".

Okay ... seriously now, kidding aside ... I do have to ask:  are the irrelevant insults about the sexual orientation and gender of Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi really necessary?  Why do you keep bringing it up in your first post?  I don't get it.  Anyway, on to the points:

• You are right, the public option is in the House bill and now the Senate bill.  Excuse me a moment . . . . *celebratory dance* . . . . ahem, okay then.

• The argument of Frank and people who want single-payer someday is that people will flock to public insurance because it will be much cheaper, secure, efficient, etc.  If public insurance is better than private insurance, that's competition for you, don't hate the player hate the game.
  

• You say low profit margins derive from competition.  Of course.  But we have Aetna, B.C.B.S., WellPoint, Cigna, WellCare, United, Humana just to name the biggest insurers....they aren't competing with each other?  There's no competition?  The primary competition that is lacking is competition between private and public insurance.  And at some point, isn't too much competition a bad thing when it comes to insurance (i.e. more insurers, and therefore smaller pools of shared risk)?
  

• The Commerce Clause:  but interstate insurance companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield are interstate commerce.  No?
  

• "If you don't like their prohibitions/exclusions, don't engage them ... they'll soon be out of business".  Not sure what that means.  If you have a preexisting condition or if you can't afford to pay, they probably don't want your business anyway.
  

• Amendment IX:  See my response to Fred under the comments to "Obamacare (Guest Post)" Oct. 24, 2009.

• Please be specific on how the bill excludes Congress, unions, etc.  If you're in a union you won't have a public option?

• Death Panels:  For goodness' sake, I was being facetious!  There are no government-run death panels in Britain which would deny needed care to a person with muscular dystrophy, as our privately-owned death panels do.  The quote from Stephen Hawking is an actual quote.

• My health insurance: comes from an employer-sponsored insurance program.

Finally:  my perspective has changed a lot.  I voted for Bush in 2004 and believed America would never torture captured enemy combatants.  Then my youthful idealism confronted reality.  Of COURSE I'm open to changing my mind.  And I'm sure you are as well ... right? : )

Obamacare 2 (Guest Post)

Note:This is a guest post by JRB

To quote the OLD MAN’s Shakepeare (Hamlet, ACT III, Scene II),

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks!”

Responding to your posts, each in turn:

First, if you check the current legislative initiatives, the Government-run public option is back in, just as I predicted.

Second, if you read Congressman Frank’s public blitherings, he clearly states that a public option is the one sure way to achieve a single-payer (i.e., government run) system. Why? Because the mandates within the legislation will force people who change jobs into the public option, as will definitions which exclude private alternatives. These weaseling maneuvers, which Congress hopes the public won’t recognize, resurrect the old Henry Ford dictum. I.e., “you can have any color you want, so long as it’s black.”

Third, “King Herod” (the insurance industry) generally makes about a 2-3% profit margin on its product sales. That’s $20-30mm per billion in sales, or $12-18mm after the government exacts their levy. Large grocery chains make about 1% on sales. The low margins, and ergo prices, derive directly from competition, that horrible, blood-sucking capitalistic invention.

Fourth, you are spot-on w.r.t. the Patriot Act’s constitutional violations. It authorizes, among other things, self-authorized search warrants by the FBI without judicial approval. This is a clear violation of the Constitution (Amendment IV).

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html#amendmentiv).

I never stated, or implied, that Obama or the DUMBocrats had a monopoly on constitutional misogyny.

Fifth, your interaction with your physician regarding a health issue isn’t an interstate transaction; ergo it’s not covered under the seventeen specifically allowed federal prerogatives. Indeed the Framer’s original intent, within the Commerce Clause, was to ensure that one state did not prohibit another state from offering products & services to the first state’s citizenry.

Sixth, Aetna & CIGNA have no God-given rights (I’m glad you capitalized God; your parents clearly did something right!). If you don’t like their prohibitions/exclusions, don’t engage them. If they’re so dismissive of the public good, and a myriad of people agree with you, they’ll soon be out of business, just another of those awful characteristics of capitalism.

Seventh, Amendment IX, as you correctly quote, says that unenumerated rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Amen to that! Please focus on the last three words, “by the people.” The people retain such rights, not the government. Nowhere does it state, or imply, that the federal government shall assume the administration of these rights on behalf of the people. If anything, it confers the securing of such rights to the states, but only after sanctioning by the citizenry. Ergo, the “explosion” you reference seems to be a “dud”.

Eighth, note who the current legislation excludes:
• Congress
• Government employees
• Union members
Is there anything in this “fraternity” that inspires consternation? Please tell me why any of these group deserves exemption from the laws they are set to impose on the rest of us.

Ninth, there is a delicious irony in your comment that,

“the government-run Death Panels are slow and inefficient by American standards”

while advocating that we have government run health care. So, you admit that the government has “death panels”, and, by logical extension, your proposition is that it’s better to have a slow and inefficiently run system, which delays poor decisions, rather than have a faster and more efficient system that engenders good decisions. Sounds like a pyrrhic trade off to me.

Tenth, pray tell, do you have health care, and from whence does it derive?

Lastly, please keep the incendiary nature of these polemics in perspective. I have known you since you were born. You are an intelligent, passionate, accomplished and articulate young man. I am as proud of you as are your parents, and as if you were my own progeny. Your views may change as life unfolds. Simply leave yourself open that one’s perspective may be altered as youthful idealism confronts reality.

Britain's government Death Panels keep disabled waiting longer, less efficient than than America's private insurance Death Panels

The private insurance company Guardian deemed its reported 2008 profit margin of 4.2% too slim, and hired private investigators to look for any reason to drop customers with muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, and paralysis.  When this strategy failed, Guardian's Death Panels-- which referred to its disabled customers as "dogs" and "trainwrecks" in internal memos released by court order --launched its "Moving Forward" campaign to drop their coverage anyway.  Ian Pearl, a man born with muscular dystrophy who became ventillator-dependent in 1991, and requires constant nursing care to keep him alive, writes that for him this is a death sentence.  The private insurance Death Panels will drop his coverage effective December 1, 2009 -- a mere 18 years after Pearl became dependent on full-time nursing care.

Meanwhile, British physicist Stephen Hawking continues to wait for his government-issued execution orders.  Like Pearl, Hawking was born with muscular dystrophy.  But in Britain, the government-run Death Panels are slow and inefficient by American standards, and long death sentence wait times are common.  Hawking has been waiting for Death Panel review for nearly 24 years since he became dependent on full-time nursing care for survival. 

Referring to the British National Health System (NHS), Hawking blamed government ineptitude for the delay.  "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," he said. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

Obamacare (Guest Post )

FREY vs FREY

Before I respond to FreyGuy’s defense of the ever-changing Health Care Legislation, especially his predilection for a so-called “public option”, I’ll first throw a giant monkey wrench into all the prior arguments. However, before I do that, I would note, by analogy, to which a future physicist can relate, that the legislative initiatives seem to come and go so fast, that were they mapped mathematically, the curve would more resemble a continuous function, rather than a discrete set of points.

Get ready, here’s the monkey wrench!

Congress has no authority under the Constitution to regulate health care.

(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574412793406386548.html)

Congress is relying – mistakenly – on a liberal interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html#section1)

which states:

[Congress shall have the power] “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”

This clause is among seventeen powers specifically ascribed to the federal government under Section 8. If a power is not so contained among the seventeen it is expressly reserved to the states (AMENDMENT X):

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html#amendmentx

Thus the Framers, even in their most soaring flights of fancy, never envisioned that 1/6th of the Nation’s economy would be subject to federal regulation. So, even if a poll showed that 100% of the people favored federal government run health care, the Constitution does not allow it. Poll results, however, change significantly when the question posed expressly adds a proviso that asks their opinion if added taxes or other confiscatory measures are placed upon the respondent.

However, for the sake of pure argument, let us wave an arbitrary hand and grant that, in a prolonged fit of legislative insanity, such powers did indeed reside within the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body.” (As an aside, if this is the world’s greatest deliberative body, with average IQ less than 100, and nary a one above 125, then I shudder to imagine the acumen of a lesser deliberative body).

Now let us examine whether universal health care is an idea with merit.

First, let us set forth a few maxims which should govern the discussion:

• All insurance, whether auto, life, home, health, etc., and regardless of who delivers it, represents, by definition, a risk sharing pool. I.e., each participant puts his or her small amount of cash in a pool to provide protection against calamitous events which will be paid from the moneys supplied by other members of the pool (as well as earnings retained from prior activities of the insurance provider).

• Save for the auto segment, insurance is elective. In the case of auto insurance, it is mandatory not to protect you from others, but to protect others from you. In addition, the mandate comes not from the federal government, but from each of the 50 states. Health care insurance is to protect you. And to silence another oft –used, but ill-informed parallel, that home insurance is mandatory, it is not. It is only mandatory if you have a mortgage, which is required by the lender to protect his collateral. If you own your house outright, you can elect to insure it or not.

• Health care, under the Constitution, is not a right. It may be a compassionate thing to do, but it is not a natural right. Natural rights are a philosophical construct put forth by Thomas Jefferson who decreed that such rights are “endowed by the Creator” as opposed to the Adamsonian school, which argued that they were conferred “by the consent of the governed.” While both phrases are contained in the Declaration of Independence, a simple reading of the document, as well as scholarly review, admit that Jefferson’s take precedence. (http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm)

Your natural rights are spelled out in the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, collectively known as the Bill of Rights, proposed by James Madison in 1789 and enacted into law in 1791. There is no mention of a ‘Right’ to health care in the Bill of Rights.

Thus, any insurance product represents a potential redistribution of wealth from those who have no claims to those who do, as well as the wealth of the insurance provider in case the premium pool (plus earnings thereon) is insufficient to cover claims. It is potential, because, if there are no claims, then, at least in the case of mutual insurance companies, excess moneys are returned to the policy holders in the form of dividends, as they are the owners of the company.

The difference between a private plan and a public one is that, in the former, the wealth redistribution takes place voluntarily between the participants in the risk sharing pool (and potentially the insurance company), whereas, with a public plan, the redistribution occurs involuntarily, from all taxpayers to those covered under the plan. Now, I don’t know about you, but when a governmental body tells me I have to do something, especially when their authority to do so is highly questionable, my natural inclination is to respond, UP YOURS!

Below are the issues I have with nationalized health care, at least in its current form. If anyone can offer reasonable assurance that these allegations have any factual basis, I’d feel more sanguine about climbing aboard the OBAMAWAGON.

1. Nationalized Health Care Won’t Cost Anything.
There are six dimensions to this facade. Four purportedly raise revenue; two reduce costs. Here they are:
• Revenue components
o Raise taxes on employers
Employers will raise prices on their goods & services, so this tax will be passed on to the consumer.
o Raise taxes on individuals
This is simply wealth redistribution, a veritable staple in the liberal/socialist financial cupboard, which is trying to turn America from a land of equal opportunity to a land of equal financial outcomes.
o Tax the insurance benefit (a 2nd tax)
Now here’s a novel idea. Presumably, if you receive health coverage from a private group plan offered and partially subsidized by your employer, the government wants to tax the benefit represented by the difference you pay under the group plan vs. the bucks you’d pay if you obtained the coverage outside the group plan. The problem is that, when filing your tax return, the IRS rules require that your income and expenses be cash-based. This is not a cash benefit, so the IRS would have to impute a non-cash value to this benefit, abrogating its own rules. Nice!
o Mandatory insurance
Forces the young & healthy, who don’t need coverage, to subsidize those who do (see#9 below)
• Cost saving components
o Reduce payments to doctors
This is a real savings, unless doctors begin leaving the profession in droves. If you coupled it with tort reform (see below) there’s real potential here.
o Reduce Medicare benefits
This is a classic example of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It saves no money, just transfers wealth from one pocket (senior citizens) to another (the uninsured).
There’s also a real cost saving conspicuous by its absence: tort reform. I.e., rein in the ambulance chasing legal bottom-dwellers. Given the American Bar Association donates overwhelmingly to the Democratic party, this is as likely to occur as the sun is to revolve around the Earth.
2. There will be no Health Care Rationing
This is simple supply & demand economics. If there is more demand for a product or service and/or less supply, the price will rise. But if we mandate more people be insured and slash moneys paid to providers, the system enters disequilibrium and service queues form until supply/demand equilibrium is re-established. England and Canada are prime examples. This is rationing by delay rather than by financial wherewithal. To paraphrase an old legal adage, “healthcare delayed is healthcare denied.”
3. The Government can Efficiently Run a National Health Care System
OK, let’s look at the record:
• Social Security – BROKE!
• Medicare – BROKE!
• Medicaid – BROKE!
• AMTRAK – BROKE!
• Post Office - BROKE!
• The Federal Budget - BROKE!
Do we detect a pattern here?! If so, why would we expect different results in a Nationalized Health Care System? Isn’t one of the classic definitions of insanity to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result?
4. Our Congressmen Know What’s in the Bill
Be serious! The bill stretches beyond 1,000 pages. Indeed, the bill likely emanating from a congressional conference committee is estimated at 2,300 pages. Congress hasn’t read that much of anything in their collective lifetime. Their staffs prepare summaries for them. Most staffers are 22-25 years of age, fresh out of college with liberal arts degrees, rendering them largely uneducated.

An example should suffice to lay this myth to rest. When the Patriot Act, pushed by then president Bush, was signed into law in OCT 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act) , Congress, via their internal intranet, had no access to the Bill until 15 minutes before the roll call. It was 315 pages long. There was no time to read it before the vote. Therefore, they were completely unaware of its contents when they voted overwhelmingly to enact it. This will be no different, except that the Healthcare Bill is three to eight times the length and even less likely to be read and understood.
5. The Bill Won’t Change at the Last Minute
Yes it will! Messrs. Reid and Pelosi (that’s right, I’m not sure Pelosi is a real woman, just as I’m uncertain that Barney Frank is a real man) have already said it will, and one of those changes they’ve alluded to will be a public option. Congressman Frank wants to use the public option to get to a Government run single-payer system and has publicly said so.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3BS4C9el98&feature=related).

Single-payer means there is no insurance provider save the federal government.

(BTW, do you recall when Congressman Frank, at his own town hall meeting, dissed a constituent by asking what planet she was from, forgetting, in the process, that he was there to serve them, and not vice-versa. What she should have responded was, “I’m from Mother Earth, but, based on your nocturnal proclivities, I’m pretty sure you’re not.”)
6. There will be no Pork in the Bill
Really?! Please comb the public record and find a single bill that didn’t include congressional pork.
7. Illegal Immigrants won’t be Covered by the Legislation
Uhhh, …, I don’t think so! While both House and Senate proposals purportedly exclude illegal aliens, they purposely exempt any requirement for such a person to provide identification. Republican amendments to require picture IDs from public option health care recipients have been defeated by Democratic party-line vote. This is the type of weaseling which makes people circumspect about how Congress operates and the degree of trust they should be accorded.
http://www.examiner.com/x-5919-Norfolk-Crime-Examiner~y2009m8d3-Illegal-aliens-will-be-covered-under-Obamas-healthcare-bill
8. The Public Option Won’t Squeeze Out Private Alternatives
By the Bill’s provisions, it will by statistical osmosis. I.e., if you’re covered by a private group plan, and leave that employer, you can’t enroll in a new employer’s group plan; you must go into the public option. Since most people change jobs during their careers, all those will be forced into the public option.

In addition, a private plan must meet the definition of being “qualified”. I.e., based on yet-to-be-determined government rules, if your employer’s private plan doesn’t meet the government’s standards, you’ll be forced into a public option, like it or not.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/24/news/economy/health_care_reform_obama.fortune/index.htm
9. Insurance Coverage is not Mandatory.
It will be mandatory; that’s one of the ways to cover costs. Young adults, who are healthy, and may not see a doctor for years, will be required to join simply to subsidize others who need health services. In fact the more recent legislative versions allow the IRS to levy a penalty and the Justice Department to throw you in jail if you refuse to join. Now, I can tell you most assuredly that were I a young person (which I’m not, to which the OLD MAN can, and most enthusiastically would, attest), and were I to want the insurance, I would refuse it just to be able to tell the IRS to stick it where the sun don’t shine. And if the Justice Department comes ‘a-callin’, I’m going to invoke my 2nd Amendment rights.
10. If Additional Taxes on Companies and Individuals Exceed Claims, the Gub’mint will Return our Money
BWAHAHAHA! This supposition is so preposterous it deserves no reply!
11. The Federal Government has the Authority to Nationalize Health Care
No it doesn’t! We’ve already slain that beast in the preamble to this missive.

Finally, isn’t it heartening and inspiring to know that Congress, in a true egalitarian spirit, and with a deep and abiding concern for the constituencies who elected them, has not exempted its own members from the very law it purports to impose upon the rest of us?

OH, WAIT!! THEY DID!!

(http://kingsrightsite.blogspot.com/2009/07/end-congressional-exemption-from-obama.html)

(http://www.cnsnews.com/Public/Content/Article.aspx?rsrcid=50756)


Guest Post by JR Berger

Obama: "Silence the critics, I say!"

I've been trying to figure out if it's scary or just silly. Maybe it's both. The president of the United States has (clearly) instructed his minions to go out and try to silence and/or discredit the only news station that commits the egregious sin of sometimes disagreeing with his policies, or, even worse, criticizing him. Anyone who believes that this is not an Obama approved (or directed) assault is...well, naive to the extreme. David Axelrod states (on a carefully picked TV cast) that Fox news is not a news operation, and should not be viewed as such. Anita(don't you just love Mao?)Dunn attacks Fox news for mistruths (without stating any). Robert Gibbs, repeats the attacks on Fox, while Rahm (The Enforcer) Emanuel, strongly suggests that other news networks not run anything that is on Fox (am I making myself clear?). All this in the space of a few days.


All presidents have had spats with, and complained about the media at some time during their tenures. But this is unprecedented. This is a thinly veiled, coordinated, president approved initiative to discredit, intimidate and shut off dissent. This is unamerican, strikes at the heart of freedom (free speech and dissent), and should be publicly rebuked, especially by those liberals who hate Fox News, but love free speech. To be a credible advocate of free speech and dissent, one must vigorously defend those rights for those with whom one disagrees.

The Old Man

Obama Voted Homecoming King!

It would be nice if a so called "prestigious" award, presented in the name of one of man's highest ideals, was conferred after serious deliberations with rigorous standards. But the selection of President Obama, eight months into office, with his biggest peace accomplishment being gaining a fragile truce between a professor and a police officer over a beer, exposes the Nobel peace award process for what it is...a popularity contest. This is not unlike a high school Homecoming King and Queen vote, the attractive, popular kids get elected. I suppose we Americans could be happy that at least it says that they like our president...if it weren't for the fact that they like him for apologizing for the rest of us.

The Old Man

Reading Comprehension

The argument in "Obama Math" follows from the following false premises: the uninsured are comprised of the following roughly equal groups,

1. Illegal immigrants
2. People eligible for public insurance, but not reached by them
3. People who have access to prive insurance but decide it is too expensive
   

These premises are contradicted by the very study cited, so the argument that rests on them can be dismissed.

In fact, it is not possible for these premises to be more thoroughly opposite what the Kaiser study actually says. Anyone with basic, grade-school level reading comprehension skills can discover this by reading the study, "The Uninsured: A Primer: Key facts about Americans without health insurance", Kaiser Family Foundation, 2008 (pdf). Or you can read the Senate Testimony from the Kaiser Foundation in 2009. Or read the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine 2009 report "America's Uninsured Crisis". I have cited all these studies before.

But let me address the above false premises in turn.

1. Illegal immigrants

There is brief mention of citizenship in the Kaiser study:

"The large majority of the uninsured (79%) are native or naturalized U.S. citizens."

The remaining 21% are explicitly identified as non-citizens. There is no mention of illegal immigrants. So much for premise (1).

2. Eligible, but not reached by public programs

There is zero mention in the study of people who are enrolled in public programs, but who nevertheless are not "reached", that is, do not receive due coverage. So the only viable interpretation of premise (2) is that one-third of the uninsured are eligible for public insurance, but not enrolled.

(By the way, reaching all those enrolled is quite an accomplishment for a supposedly inefficient government program. I wonder how many people are enrolled in private insurance who do not receive or are denied due coverage?)

There is one single mention of the enrollment issue in the 31-page Kaiser study:

"Medicaid and SCHIP cover half of all low-income children. These programs have played a critical role in improving access to care for children. Still, two-thirds of uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP but are not enrolled.43 Some families are not aware of the availability of the programs or may not believe their children are eligible. But, many families face barriers to enrolling and keeping their children in public programs, including rules that require U.S. citizens to document their citizenship and identity when applying for Medicaid or renewing their coverage."

But only 20% of the uninsured are children to begin with, so we are talking about less than 14% of people being uninsured due to failure to enroll in public insurance. So much for premise (2).

If we care to take a brief stroll through the real world, the real study explicitly repeats, for 31 pages, the problem of ineligibility:

"Medicaid covers some parents and low-income individuals with disabilities, but most adults without dependent children—regardless of how poor—are ineligible for Medicaid. As a result, over 40% of poor parents and adults without children are uninsured (Figure 19)."

"Adults make up more than their share of the uninsured because they are less likely than children to be eligible for Medicaid"

"Public coverage had also increased among adults between 2000 and 2004, but with Medicaid’s limits on adult eligibility, it was not enough to buffer the loss of job-based coverage. "

"The near-poor (those with incomes between 100% and 199% of the poverty level) also run a high risk of being uninsured (29%), in part, because they are less likely to be eligible for Medicaid. "

"When people are unable to obtain employer-sponsored coverage and are ineligible for Medicaid, they may be left uninsured for long periods of time if individual coverage is either unaffordable or unavailable due to their health status."

"For example, a parent in a family of three working full-time at the minimum wage could not qualify for Medicaid in 29 states in 2007.44"

Ineligible. Not "eligible, but not being reached". Ineligible.

It's striking that this group of people, constantly referred to in these studies, is absent from premises (1) (2) and (3).

Of course, we could expand public programs to make more poor people eligible, a strategy which has insured millions of adults and children in the past, according to the study. We could even eliminate the minor enrollment problem by making public insurance available to everyone. Few people scratch their heads trying to figure out if they are poor enough to "qualify" for public libraries, museums, parks, or schools. I think that's because these are free, public services, there are no complicated rules designed to exclude most people and protect private sector profits.

But that would mean more of the bad kind of spending, and less of the good kind of spending, like the premiums we all pay and the taxes we all pay to subsidize private insurance profits right now, which the Kaiser study also discusses. Anyway, on to premise (3).

3. One third of the uninsured have access to private insurance, but decide it's too expensive

I'll just quote the study. See the actual study for nifty pie graphs. Keywords: afford, unaffordable, poor:

"Despite strong ties to the workforce—over eight in ten uninsured come from working families—about two-thirds of the uninsured are individuals and families who are poor (incomes less than the federal poverty level or $21,203 for a family of four in 2007) or near-poor (with incomes between one and two times the poverty level). "

"For many of the uninsured, the costs of health insurance and medical care are weighed against equally essential needs. The uninsured are about three times as likely as those with health coverage to live in a household that is having difficulty paying monthly expenses as basic as rent, food, and utilities.20"

"In 2007, 58% of all low-income employees were offered and eligible for employer-sponsored coverage, leaving more than four in ten without access to this coverage (Figure 16)."

"Despite having lower incomes and thus typically fewer resources to pay for necessities, 62% of low-income employees who are eligible for employer-sponsored coverage choose to enroll."

And just for fun, a quote from the Institute of Medicine 2009 report (cited above):

"Overall, fewer workers, particularly those with lower wages, are offered employer-sponsored insurance, and fewer among the workers that are offered such insurance can afford the premiums. ... For many individuals and families without employer-sponsored group coverage, nongroup coverage is unaffordable."

Unaffordable. Not "they had access, but decided not to get private insurance". Unaffordable.
So much for premise (3).

Should Obama have accepted the Nobel peace prize?

From the Philadelphia Inquirer ,

WASHINGTON - President Obama yesterday won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, bringing the relatively novice leader a new measure of prestige on the world stage but also potential complications in carrying out a foreign policy that includes managing two wars.

This is a joke, right? Please tell me this is Norwegian humor.

Obama Math

It’s been a long time since I took math in school, and President Obama did promise change. So it’s not surprising, I guess, that his approach to math never seems to add up to me. The first example follows.

The highly respected Kaiser study on health insurance, published a few years ago, broke the approximately 15% of Americans without health insurance into almost equal three parts. The first were illegal immigrants; the second were Medicaid and state assistance eligible people who had not been reached by, or didn’t know how to effectively get government health care; and the third were people who had access to private insurance, but opted out because they decided it was too expensive. The president has now stated publicly, in an address to congress, that no illegal immigrants will have access to his new health care plan. Okay, that solves about one third of the problem, but I fail to see what’s happened positively in that part of the decision. President Obama has also endorsed a plan making its’ way through the Senate, that will force all people not eligible for a government plan (like Medicaid or Medicare) to purchase a private health plan or be assessed $1,900 of a non tax to pay for their health insurance. Let me understand this better. The roughly one third of Americans without health insurance because they opted out…didn’t want to pay the premiums…will be solved by…effectively making them pay the premiums! As the cartoon character on a commercial says…Brilliant! As for the last third, those currently eligible for government aid and/or health insurance, the new plan will…offer them government aid and/or health insurance. Again…Brilliant!

So, all people will have health insurance. The illegal immigrants who don’t have health insurance today, won’t have it in the new plan either, but they won’t count now (‘cause Obama say so). Therefore these numbers, used to inflate the overall uninsured numbers to invoke “crisis”, will be eliminated and immediately bring the uninsured numbers down to about 36 million from the 47 million bandied about in the crusade to save America from the uninsured healthcare “crisis”. (See, success already). As a matter of fact, Administration supporters, since the startling revelation to liberals that it will cost more to add 47 million people to the health care system, have already started to say in the media that “nobody ever planned to add anything like 47 million people to the health care system.

The roughly one third uninsured who are currently eligible for state or Medicaid health insurance (but don’t sign up) will still have the same programs. But there’s a big difference. Now they’ll be told to sign up, or it’s not the governments’ fault, and they’ll count as covered, even though they don’t sign up or use the program (‘cause Obama say so). Whew! We’re down to about 5% of Americans without health insurance now, but that was hard work.

But we won’t rest with our lofty compassion, until we solve the health care “crisis” for the last third of the uninsured. This is the problem of the people we feel the worst about. People who said they can’t afford to pay for health insurance, even though it is available to them. They will be pleased that the new health care plan has a solution for them…Pay! Either pay your health insurance, or we’ll assess it from you (in a non tax, of course). If you don’t pay the assessment, we have the right to put you in jail.

Now that we have everyone covered, we have to manage this little issue of cost. So, we’ll save hundreds of millions by…taking away benefits from Medicare and Medicaid! Second, the government will reduce costs by weeding out hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud in…the government run programs! Then we’ll add dozens of government agencies that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to oversee these programs.

I can’t put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t add up to me. I’ll just have to learn Obama math, I guess.

The Old Man