Obamacare

I am no health-care expert like Zeke Emanuel or Jonathan Gruber, but I do know that Obamacare is a race car designed and built by a kindergarten finger-painting class. Instead of Obummer's promise of reducing the cost of family health-care insurance by an average of $2,500 per year, many "bad apple" insurance plans were replaced by rotten apple ones and costs are skyrocketing. Supposedly 20 million more people have health insurance (a number I doubt ... like just about everything else the Obummer administration claims) ... and, of those, over 90% are in a form of Medicaid.

But just looking at the Obamacare insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles suggest that, for those poor schmoes who pay full freight, this is not traditional health insurance. It is a bastardized form of major medical. This is because of astronomical deductibles often in five figures as well as high co-pays ... just like old-time major medical plans. However, because of the need to pay for the free-riders, their premiums are many times higher than what they would have been previously. This is a classical screw job ... particularly because, if they don't buy this dreck, then they get fined by the IRS (or as John Roberts called it, a "tax") and still have no insurance.

I can't close this short indictment of Obamacare without a big "thank you" to Senator Marco Rubio who stopped the effort to subsidize health-care insurance companies for their losses. Without his blockage, the Obummer administration would have papered over these losses that have subsequently forced many insurance companies to drop out of this ill-constructed program. If he hadn't done this, the U.S. taxpayer unknowingly would be paying billions more to keep this program afloat ... see: New York Times Article.

And, by the way, this law was supposed to empty hospital Emergency Rooms of those without insurance. Have you been to one lately? They are just as crowded as before ... another Obummer fib.

Gordian Knot

Obamacare is a very complex administrative process to both understand and, as we have seen, to utilize. Therefore when one sees things there deteriorating, one cannot decide if these are fatal events ... or, if the administration can throw money at these maladies in order to keep the patient alive.

One thing that we do know is that the Affordable Care Act is turning out to be anything but affordable. Premiums next year are slated to increase 10.1%. And this is still before the employer mandate fully kicks in. This portion of this Gordian Knot of a law is expected to add fuel to the pyre upon which the American health-care consumer is being sacrificed. That is why this mandate has been repeatedly postponed by administrative fiat ... apparently trying to save the Democrat party from election defeat.

Most recently there have been two events that cast a pall on this MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber's convoluted monstrosity:

1) Over one half of the government health-care insurance co-ops have disappeared or are expected to disappear by year end due to massive cost overruns ... see: Fox News Story. These co-ops were set up under this law to the tune of two billion dollars of taxpayer loans ... much of which is now in jeopardy. These dissolutions have left tens of thousands of consumers now without coverage ... not a good situation for these poor souls this law was supposed to help.

2) Just this past week UnitedHealth Group, the largest health-care insurance provider in the United States ... and the one endorsed by AARP ... has indicated that it is questionable whether it can continue to insure consumers under Obamacare ... having seen a $425 million revenue shortfall over the last year ... see: USA Today. If UnitedHealth drops coverage, an additional hundreds of thousands of consumers will lose their health-care insurance ... and, if this is an indication of possible financial problems at the other large insurers, then Obamacare is indeed in deep sneakers. However this threat by UnitedHealth may just be a plea for a government bailout.

Clearly, if the federal government chooses to bailout these co-ops, UnitedHealth and others, then Obamacare looks very much like a single-payer health-care system ... the objective of this administration all along. See also Marco Rubio's comments on this looming possibility: Breitbart Article.

Will-o-the-Wisp

Mankind too often has a insidious way of pushing a program or an ideology … particularly in this day of the ever-increasing pace of technology and communications … be it social media, Internet publishing, congressional law-making, financial derivatives, climate change "science," etc. … and that is what I chose to call "convoluted complexity." By this I mean that the real truth of an issue lies below so many layers of required understandings that proponents can pull a fast one on the general public with misleading rhetoric which obscures their will-o-the-wisp hidden agendas.

This strategy has been exhibited with Jonathan Gruber’s slight of hand with Obamacare (see: Washington Post Article), the convoluted misreporting of the University of Virginia gang-rape allegations (see: Daily Caller Story ), Elizabeth Warren’s attack on Congress's continuing resolution to finance our government. She says that it is helping Wall Street banks (see: Powerline Blog) and so many other current dust-ups that set my head to spinning.

What to do? How does one uncover the actual truths in these contretemps? I have fallen back on a strategy to catch the snipe in many of these seemingly hopeless media mazes. And that is to discount anything said or written by someone who appears to be creating complexity for the sake of complexity. Once an issue requires me to get a graduate degree in a discipline in order to understand it, I discount these arguments and assume that I am being hoodwinked. (I also use this strategy with most arm-waving television ads these days … for example … "call 1-800-BAD-DRUG"). This device is not of my invention … William of Occam was one of the first to propose it … see: Science Explanation of Occam's Razor. 

It seems to work in most instances.

Ends vs. Means

The old political debate about whether the ends justify the means apparently depends on what the ends, in fact, are. This dichotomy has now been in the news because of Dianne Feinstein's recent polemic against the U.S.'s enhanced interrogation techniques (aka torture) following the 9/11 attacks. Here the liberal argument is that these methods applied to despicable individuals yielded no actionable intelligence ... thus cleverly attempting to deny the CIA any justification for their actions ... see Dick Cheney's comments: Real Clear Politics.

On the other hand, the Democrats have incessantly rationalized their chicanery, bribery, and mendacity surrounding the passage of Obamacare because the result was so important that these base means were of no import ... see Jonathan Gruber's justifications of these Democrats actions: LA Times Article

Now I ask you ... are a few million more people with health insurance (don't forget, they already have healthcare ... such care cannot be denied) more important than possibly one or more new 9/11-type attacks where thousands, if not millions of Americans might be killed?

I know where I come down.

The First Ukase

President Obama has just transformed America ... as he had promised. He has issued his first ukase*... and I wonder how many more will follow?

In truth, what Obama did last night was to throw a bone to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants. This may not be all bad … except for one major flaw … and that was the way he did it. With the back of his hand he has undone what the framers of the Constitution feared most … he has become all-powerful. The people’s representatives, Congress, have just been neutered to the point of irrelevance … for they have no options. If they pass an immigration reform bill to his liking in the next six months, they will be bending to his will. If they don’t, then his ukase stands unless and until the Supreme Court finds the gumption to strip him of this authority … which may take months if not years. In the meantime the damage done will be irreversible.

The most insidious part of this ukase is that it appears to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship … but is gift-wrapped in quite a few more presidential lies. These lies are meant to sugar-coat this blatant usurpation of power with administrative niceties that we all know will never be implemented. They are:

-        Our border’s will be made more secure

-        These newly legalized illegal immigrants will not be allowed to vote

-        These newly legalized illegal immigrants will not be eligible for Obamacare and a myriad of other welfare benefits

-        These newly legalized illegal immigrants will have to pay back income taxes and continue to do so into the future

-        Illegal-immigrant criminals will be deported

These amnesty-mitigating lies are so obvious that they are laughable … probably the side-splitting tenor of the White House meetings in which they were inserted into the president’s speech. I wonder if Jonathan Gruber was somehow involved in constructing this ukase?

* “A ukase, in Imperial Russia, was a proclamation of the tsar, government, or a religious leader (patriarch) that had the force of law.”

The Smirk

I don't know about you, but I often get the feeling the President Obama enjoys twisting the tail of the collective American public. Whenever he says something that he must know drives us up the wall, he often gets that half smirk on his face ... for an example, see the following video about his "non-foreknowledge" of Jonathan Gruber's role in crafting Obamacare: Breitbart Video. He knows he is lying ... and he knows that we know he is lying. His half smirk is his way of giving his enemies the one-finger salute and showing his gang members that he is still the alpha dog. All that is really missing is that playground taunt, "NAH, NAH, NAH, NAH!"

How did we Americans get ourselves into such a Kafkaesque position?

Stupid Is That Stupid Does

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economics professor who has been called the architect of Obamacare, has made the headlines (only on Fox News unfortunately) by repeatedly referring to the American people as stupid and needing to be deceived about the Democrats' remaking of our health care system ... see: Powerline Opinion. Let me see, we twice elected Barack Obama president without knowing much about his background except what he chose to tell us (or to concoct.) The more damaging aspects of his earlier life were generally either ignored or rationalized by our nation's media.

Perhaps Gruber was right after all ...

Afterward: Since no Democrat seems to remember Professor Gruber's contributions to the construction of Obamacare, John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog has suggested that Gruber give back the $6 million of taxpayer money he collected in the process ... see: About Gruber, I have One Question. You also might enjoy Grubergate for Dummies.

Lefty Lemmings

I can't possibly out wordsmith Charles Krauthammer ... so I won't. I will just ask you to read his recent OpEd on that MIT professor, Jonathan Gruber's Obamacare confessions ... see: Washington Post Column. If after you have digested this bit of enlightenment, you are still a fan of the current administration health-care solutions, then I'll count you as an unrepentant lefty lemming. If you chose not to read it, then ditto. Sorry for being so blunt ...