Archive for November, 2013

Spengler on Obama and Iran.

Wednesday, November 27th, 2013

A columnist for the Asia Times, who has called himself Spengler, has for years written insightful articles about world events. His latest column is no exception.

He considers Iran’s obsession with Israel and the Jews.

Iran’s motive for proposing to annihilate the Jewish State is the same as Hitler’s, and the world’s indifference to the prospect of another Holocaust is no different today than it was in 1938. It is the dead’s envy for the living.

Dying civilizations are the most dangerous, and Iran is dying. Its total fertility rate probably stands at just 1.6 children per female, the same level as Western Europe, a catastrophic decline from 7 children per female in the early 1980s. Iran’s present youth bulge will turn into an elderly dependent problem worse than Europe’s in the next generation and the country will collapse. That is why war is likely, if not entirely inevitable.

There is good evidence that the people of Iran have no enthusiasm for the regime and some of this concerns religion. There is also the matter of fertility and Iranian women have been voting with their uterus.

“Iran’s low fertility rate has produced a rapidly aging population, according to a new U.N. report. The rate has declined from 2.2 births per woman in 2000 to 1.6 in 2012. This has pushed the median age of Iranians to 27.1 years in 2010, up from 20.8 years in 2000. The median age could reach 40 years by 2030, according to the U.N. Population Division. An elderly and dependent population may heavily tax Iran’s public health infrastructure and social security network.”

In 2005 and 2006, I was the first Western analyst to draw strategic conclusions from this trend, the steepest decline in fertility in the history of the world. Iran must break out and establish a Shiite zone of power, or it will break down.

Further evidence is the precipitous fall in religious observance.

In recent years Iran has spent millions of dollars building new mosques and refurbishing old ones, but attendance has declined sharply. Leading religious leaders are now suggesting that they should show feature films in order to attract more people to prayers.
In the other hand religious authorities of Iran have acknowledged that the young generation is becoming more and more interesting in Christianity. They also announced that the Bible have penetrated into the most of the Iranian houses.

Here is a prior Spengler column on the topic.

Iran resembles the Soviet Union just before the collapse of communism. It turned out that there were no communists in Russia outside the upper echelons of the party. There are very few Muslims in Iran outside of the predatory mullahcracy. According to Zohreh Soleimani of the BBC, Iran has the lowest mosque attendance of any Muslim country; only 2% of adults attend Friday services, a gauge of disaffection comparable to church attendance in Western Europe. Iran’s fertility rate of about 1.6 children per women, coincidentally, is about the same as Western Europe’s. Iran has a huge contingent of young people, but they have ceased to have children. They have faith neither in the national religion nor in the future of their nation.

What drives Obama’s desire to placate America’s enemies ?

He deeply identifies with the fragile, unraveling cultures of the Third World against the depredations of the globalizing Metropole. So, I suspect, does his mentor and chief advisor, the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett, and most of his inner circle. This goes beyond the famous declaration of Jimmy Carter’s advisor Hamilton Jordan—“the Palestinians are the n****ers of the Middle East”—and Carter’s own mainline-Protestant reverence for the “holy men” of Iran’s 1979 Iranian revolution. It goes beyond the post-colonial theory of liberal academia. For Obama, it is a matter of personal experience. His father and stepfather were Third World Muslims, his mother was an anthropologist who dedicated her life to protecting the traditional culture of Indonesia against the scourge of globalization, and four years of his childhood were spent at an Indonesian school. The same point has been made by Dinesh d’Souza, among others.

He does not identify with America and its history.

Obama’s commitment to rapprochement with Iran arises from deep personal identification with the supposed victims of imperialism. That is incongruous, to be sure. Persia spent most of its history as one of the nastier imperial powers, and its present rulers are no less ambitious in their pursuit of a pocket empire in the Shi’ite world. The roots of his policy transcend rationality. Israel can present all the evidence in the world of Iran’s plans to build nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and the Iranians can cut the Geneva accord into confetti. Obama will remain unmoved. His heart, like his late mother’s, beats for the putatively oppressed peoples of the so-called Third World.

We have never had a president like this. Many of us sensed this in 2008 as this unvetted and mysterious candidate was pushed by the news media and the white guilt of American elites. It will not end well. Perhaps the coming catastrophe of health care collapse will get the attention of American voters, if nothing else will. I hope it does not take the form of a nuclear device going off in New York harbor or a suicidal war with Israel. How this came to be will be a topic for history books, assuming history will still be written 50 years from now.

Are we headed into rough racial waters ?

Monday, November 25th, 2013

The recent news about “The Knockout Game” is disturbing. The Chicago “flash robs” story has been bubbling along under the radar for a couple of years. The CNN story makes a weak point.

On Monday morning’s edition of CNN’s New Day, expert guest Harry Houck, a former NYPD detective, went there, explaining to the New Day anchor team that while “not every black kid is doing this,” the only suggestion he could offer to avoid such attacks was “crossing the street, getting away from them” if you see “a group of black youths.”

Thanks a lot. What about the story as an indicator of the state of racial relations in the USA ?

Houck replied that the trend is real, adding that “Urban myths don’t exist. These attacks exist in everyone’s minds, especially in those victims.”

That’s when the familiar language of race-baiting began. Asked if the media was contributing to the problem by hyping the attacks, Houck replied that “I think we have to let the public know what’s going on to protect ourselves. That’s our job. That’s the police department’s job to protect the public. No matter how politically incorrect it might be. It’s to know what is going on and how to protect themselves.”

In fact, it has been concealing the magnitude of the problem. I’m reading a book titled, “White Girl Bleed a Lot”, which provides lots of examples andd lots of videos. The black kids, boys and girls, who are the perpetrators have been videoing the attacks and uploading the videos to You-Tube where they can be seen by millions. They are proud of what they are doing.

Thomas Sowell is concerned,

When I first saw a book by Colin Flaherty with the title “White Girl Bleed a Lot,” I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author.

That is because I had encountered that phrase before, while doing research for the four new chapters on intellectuals and race that I wrote for the revised edition of my own book Intellectuals and Society, published this year.

Is the media “hyping ” these stories ?

Ignoring racial violence only guarantees that it will get worse. The Chicago Tribune has publicly rationalized its filtering out of any racial identification of attackers and their victims, even though the media do not hesitate to mention race when decrying statistical disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates.

Such mob attacks have become so frequent in Chicago that officials promoting conventions there have recently complained to the mayor that the city is going to lose business if such widespread violence is not brought under control.

Two recent victims were doctors attending a convention of oncologists at McCormick Place. They were walking on north Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s “Miracle Mile,” a heavy tourist destination where I have spent many hours. The newspaper stories mention “young men” as the culprits.

No one was seriously hurt in the flurry of five random attacks by a mob of young men on Chicago’s lakefront over the weekend.

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Iran wins. We lose

Sunday, November 24th, 2013

The announced “six month” agreement between the European nations negotiating with Iran, with the US included, and the Mullahs of Iran is an complete surrender to the Mullahs. I say the Mullahs since it appears that the people of Iran are no more part of the government than were the people of the Soviet Union.

I am not an expert on Iran so I will quote one:

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective. Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement. Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.”

There’s more:

Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges. Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers.

We are now in a position where we must trust the rationality of the Iranian Mullahs who have previously declared their willingness to die if they can eliminate the state of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu is not impressed.

“What was concluded in Geneva last night is not a historic agreement, it’s a historic mistake,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters. “It’s not made the world a safer place. Like the agreement with North Korea in 2005, this agreement has made the world a much more dangerous place.”

“For years the international community has demanded that Iran cease all uranium enrichment. Now, for the first time, the international community has formally consented that Iran continue its enrichment of uranium.”

What will happen now ?

We should be eager to see fracking decrease our reliance on middle east oil. The Democrat repudiation of the filibuster will allow anti-fracking regulations to be enacted by extreme Obama appointees who have been held up by the threat of filibuster. One example is this EPA official.

Confirming what many in the industry long suspected, a video surfaced Wednesday in which Al Armendariz, an official at the Environmental Protection Agency, promotes the idea of crucifying oil companies. Armendariz heads up the EPA’s region 6 office, which is based in Dallas and responsible for oversight of Texas and surrounding states. The former professor at Southern Methodist University was appointed by President Obama in November 2009.

He will be joined by others.

On Thursday, after five years of Republican filibusters holding back progress on environmental regulation, Senate Democrats began the process of restoring democratic accountability to their broken institution and eliminated the filibuster on presidential appointments (excluding the Supreme Court). The final straw for the Democrats, who’d been reluctant to invoke the so-called nuclear option: Republicans had refused to allow votes on three qualified, ideologically mainstream nominees to vacancies on the D.C. District Court of Appeals.

The “ideologically mainstream” nominees are closer to the above example than to mainstream as the rest of us understand it. The truth is better explained as:

“Many of us believe the D.C. Circuit is the most important court in the country for environmental health and safety protections,” says John D. Walke, director of the Climate & Clean Air Program at NRDC. “In 90 to 95 percent of Clean Air Act regulatory challenges, they are the only court to rule.”

We can only hope that an Iran-Iraeli war would find us with adequate energy sources in spite of Obama.

Here comes 1933.

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

images

The Depression did not really get going until the Roosevelt Administration got its anti-business agenda enacted after 1932. The 1929 crash was a single event, much like the 2008 panic. It took major errors in economic policy to make matters worse. Some were made by Hoover, who was a “progressive” but they continued under Roosevelt.

James Taranto has a good take and quotes a couple of lefty commentators. Like Ezra Klein.

There’s a lot of upside for Republicans in how this went down. It came at a time when Republicans control the House and are likely to do so for the duration of President Obama’s second term, so the weakening of the filibuster will have no effect on the legislation Democrats can pass. The electoral map, the demographics of midterm elections, and the political problems bedeviling Democrats make it very likely that Mitch McConnell will be majority leader come 2015 and then he will be able to take advantage of a weakened filibuster. And, finally, if and when Republicans recapture the White House and decide to do away with the filibuster altogether, Democrats won’t have much of an argument when they try to stop them.

As Taranto puts it:

“”The political problems bedeviling Democrats” is a marvelous bit of understatement. The abject failure of ObamaCare has made the prospect of a Republican Senate in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017 much likelier. Thus even from a purely partisan standpoint, rational Democrats would have been more cautious about invoking the nuclear option when they did than at just about any other time in the past five years.”

The filibuster maneuver by Reid is not a demonstration of strength. It is an admission of weakness. The idiots at HuffPo and the LA Times are beating their chests in joy at the prospect of eternal Democrat majorities that can ignore those pesky Republicans.

In fact, what Reid is acknowledging is that the Democrat majority in the Senate is going away and now is the time to pack the courts and regulatory agencies with ideologues and get all the anti-business regulations in place while they can. The hard left, which believes in magic and Cargo Cults, is cheering them on.

Bloomberg sees what happened, too.

“Under any administration, federal agencies seek to implement the president’s policies by developing regulations,” Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP in Washington who has represented coal-heavy utilities, said. “But in most cases, the judges on the D.C. Circuit are the people who decide whether those regulations comply with federal law.”

I fully expect to see anti-fracking regulations roll out soon, once the Obama appointments get confirmed by the rump Senate. However, what goes around, comes around.

It is our understanding that the Supreme Court exception was included to satisfy pro-abortion extremists, the most active and basest part of the activist base. The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler reported yesterday that the two biggest such groups, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL Pro-Choice America, both declined comment on the nuclear move, “leaving it unclear whether they are concerned about their ability to block future objectionable”–i.e., Republican–“nominees.”

The abortion lobby sees the future better than giddy leftists who think government creates wealth and jobs.

Building the airplane during takeoff.

Tuesday, November 19th, 2013

Henry-Chao

We are now learning that a large share of the Obamacare structure is still unbuilt. This is not the website but the guts of the system.

The revelation came out of questioning of Mr. Chao by Rep. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.). Gardner was trying to figure out how much of the IT infrastructure around the federal insurance exchange had been completed. “Well, how much do we have to build today, still? What do we need to build? 50 percent? 40 percent? 30 percent?” Chao replied, “I think it’s just an approximation—we’re probably sitting between 60 and 70 percent because we still have to build…”

Gardner replied, incredulously, “Wait, 60 or 70 percent that needs to be built, still?” Chao did not contradict Gardner, adding, “because we still have to build the payment systems to make payments to insurers in January.”

This is the guy who is the chief IT guy for CMS.

If the ability to pay the insurance companies is not yet written, how can anybody sign up ?

Gardner, a fourth time: “But the entire system is 60 to 70 percent away from being complete.” Chao: “There’s the back office systems, the accounting systems, the payment systems…they still need to be done.”

Gardner asked a fifth time: “Of those 60 to 70 percent of systems that are still being built, how are they going to be tested?”

The answer was the same way the rest was tested.

We are halfway down the runway and the engineers are still bolting on the engines.

Of course, the unions will resist any payment for “risk corridors”

Risk Corridors are plans to bail out insurance companies that are put at risk by Obama’s “fix” by stopping the mandate penalties.

If they decide to un-cancel some plans and end up taking a beating financially from the adverse selection that results, Uncle Sam will be there to make everything right. I must have read three dozen blog posts yesterday wondering how O would be able to keep insurers on his side, working together with the White House to implement Healthcare.gov and the rest of the law, now that he’s gone and made them scapegoats for the cancellation mess. Turns out the answer’s simple. He’s going to buy them off.

Part of this is the “reinsurance” plan. The unions want nothing to do with this.

A provision in Obamacare would collect a fee from health insurance companies and third-party administrators (TPAs) of administrative services only (ASO a.k.a. self-insured) group health plans, to fund a reinsurance program to help “stabilize” premiums available through the exchanges. A significant number of unions are self-insured. Unions were pissed they had to pay this fee of between $60 and $80 per insured (now said to start at $63 and reduce in following years), and as recently as last week were demanding President Obama change the law. Obama caved.

The unions are not stupid. They want no taxes on their plans.

The tax, known as the reinsurance fee, requires self-insured organizations, such as unions and some large companies, to pay $63 for each covered member and an additional $63 for each additional family member on a health plan.

Curiouser and curiouser. Some of these guys have read the small print.

Now, it’s gotten even worse. Obama is trapped !

What happens now ?

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

healthcaregal

The Obamacare web site now has lost its happy photo of the Obamacare girl. The fact that she is a non-citizen seems appropriate. The web site is supposed to be fixed by November 30. Will that happen ? Well, maybe not.

On Friday, the man tasked with the digital fixes said the site “remains a long way from where it needs to be” as more and more problems emerge.

“As we put new fixes in, volume is increasing, exposing new storage capacity and software application issues,” Jeff Zients told reporters on a conference call.

And at Tuesday’s White House Press Briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney again said there was “more work to be done” on repairing HealthCare.gov.

Carney, along with Zients and other administration officials, have repeatedly said the November 30 deadline is to get the health care website working for a “vast majority” of Americans looking to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.

So, what happens December 2, the Monday after the “glitches” are fixed ? First, they won’t be fixed. The contractor that designed the program, not just the web site, has a terrible record.

CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry.

The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011.

Officials at the U.S. government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded six technology contracts worth $87 million to CGI Federal for Obamacare website work, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

So, assuming the program isn’t working, what next ?

First, Democrats are jumping ship already.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has decided to co-sponsor legislation from Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would require insurance companies to continue offering their existing health care plans, becoming the most high-profile non-red state Democrat to buck party lines on the Affordable Care Act.

I don’t think that approach will work.

the “Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act” would “grandfather” in all health insurance plans that existed as of Dec. 31, 2013, not March 23, 2010, meaning that insurers could continue to offer a number of plans that they have been forced to cancel under the Affordable Care Act.

The insurance industry is not going to change all this for a temporary and uncertain law change.

Even Bill Clinton is jumping ship, no doubt in the interest of Hillary’s 2016 campaign. I doubt that will help except among her most devoted followers. After all Hillarycare is the grandmother of Obamacare.

I have previously speculated on what might come next and that was early in the disastrous rollout, which I anticipated. I wasn’t the only one.

Moreover, data from existing surveys indicates that employers are quickly moving to high-deductible plans with health savings accounts, away from more expensive plans with high premiums, but low deductibles and co-pays. Notably, when employees are offered a “defined contribution” – a fixed amount of money from their employers with which to shop – they also (although not always) opt for more high-deductible options.

I think this may be the way the country copes with the ongoing disaster of Obamacare. Allow the system of high deductible insurance and health IRAs to expand. Legislation can do this. No Congress can bind another Congress.

What to do about those with pre-existing conditions ? Well, maybe the problem was slightly exaggerated.

12 million people purchased private direct purchased health insurance on the eve of Obama Care. Insurance industry studies show that one in eight applicants for private health insurance have preexisting conditions that affect their eligibility or premiums. This gives a total of 1.5 million Americans who were denied health insurance or paid higher premiums due to pre-existing conditions.

The Washington Post, of course, bought the Obama administration lie without a blink.

But must we change our whole health care system to handle a problem that affects one half of one percent? If we gave a $10,000 subsidy to each person denied coverage or paying a higher premium, we could keep our existing health-care system and solve pre-conditions for one tenth the projected cost of Obama Care.

There are other questions about motives.

You tout the Affordable Care Act as a triumph over special interests, but the stock prices of the insurance industry have enjoyed a huge run-up. Isn’t this because your program, boiled down, just throws more tax dollars at an unreformed health-care system that every analyst, including you, says spends resources inefficiently?

Insurance companies have never been enthusiastic about health insurance. I’ve worked in the insurance industry. They were co opted by Obama because they were promised (with a wink and a nod) that they would be administering a government funded program and would have “no skin in the game.” That’s what the employer health plans are and that’s what they understood to be the plan. The recent vilification of insurers risks some getting off the reservation.

Later, in discussing how he would pay for expanding health-insurance coverage, he alluded to his plan to cut the subsidy payments private insurers receive for administering Medicare advantage plans. “I would rather be giving that money to the young woman here who doesn’t have health insurance than giving it to insurance companies that are making record profits”

Then, a man who said he makes a living selling individual health-insurance plans asked Obama, “Why is it that you’ve … decided to vilify the insurance companies?”

We know he was lying. His lips were moving.

What about the poor ? Most of those signing up on the exchanges are, in fact, signing up for Medicaid.

More than 55,000 people in Washington state enrolled in health coverage in October — most in Medicaid . In fact, almost all of the people who have “signed up” for Obamacare have signed up for expanded Medicaid. They will not contribute to the risk pool; they will only draw more tax payments. Is Medicaid the best choice for the poor ? Avik Roy doesn’t think so. I have reviewed his book on the site and disagree with his proposed solution but his data is correct.

I have previously suggested the French system as a model for us. France is a large country, larger than most of the other European examples, and its system, unlike the British NHS, works well. It has been put under enormous pressure by the French unemployment problem but it still does a better job than any other I know of. The German system is older and more bound up in German traditions.

I doubt that this sort of reform is an option any longer. I think the catastrophic insurance and health IRA is the best choice for a transition now.

Why healthcare is in trouble.

Friday, November 8th, 2013

Our health care system has been built up over the years in a jury-rigged, ramshackle fashion. Before World War II, there was very little health insurance and what there was often was the product of labor union contracts. The early years were concerned with accident insurance and workers compensation laws.

The American life insurance system was established in the mid-1700s. The earliest forms of health insurance, how­ever, did not emerge until 1850, when the Franklin Health Assurance Com­pany of Massachusetts began providing accident insurance, to cover injuries re­lated to railroad and steamboat travel. From this, sickness insurance covering all kinds of illnesses and injuries soon evolved, but the first modern health insurance plans were not formed until 1930.

The Baylor program for school teachers was the first in 1929.

Medical insurance took stride in 1929 when Dr. Justin Ford Kimball, an administrator at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas, Texas, realized that many schoolteachers were not paying their medical bills. In response to this problem, he developed the Baylor Plan – teachers were to pay 50 cents per month in exchange for the guarantee that they could receive medical services for up to 21 days of any one year.

In those days, the concern was lost wages more than hospital care.

In 1939, the American Hospital Association (AHA) first used the name Blue Cross to des­ignate health care plans that met their standards. These plans merged to form Blue Cross under the AHA in 1960. Considered nonprofit organizations, the Blue Cross plans were exempted from paying taxes, enabling them to maintain low premiums. Pre-paid plans covering physician and surgeon services, includ­ing the California Physicians’ Service in 1939, also emerged around this time. These physician-sponsored plans com­bined into Blue Shield in 1946 and Blue Cross and Blue Shield merged into one company in 1971.

The modern insurance plans were very recent in origin. I was there for much of it. The commercial insurers fought the status of Blue Cross, which was not required to have reserves. Blue Cross asserted that it promised hospital care, not payment, so reserves were not necessary.

The 1940s and 1950s also saw the proliferation of employee benefit plans, and the included health insurance pack­ages became more and more compre­hensive as strong unions negotiated for additional benefits. During the Second World War, companies competing for labor had limited ability to use wages to attract employees due to wartime wage controls, so they began to compete through health insurance packages. The companies’ healthcare expenses were exempted from income tax, and the resulting trend is largely responsible for the workplace’s present role as the main supplier of health insurance.

The war produced much of this as wage limitations were in force but fringe benefits, like health insurance, were permitted. A lot of this history is contained in Paul Starr’s book The Social Transformation of American Medicine.

From the first, commercial insurers focused on employer plans while Blue Cross and Blue Shield (which was founded by the California Medical Association to pay doctor bills) were individual plans.

In 1954, Social Security coverage included disability benefits for the first time, and in 1965, Medicare and Medicaid pro­grams were introduced, in part because of the Democratic majority in Congress. In the 1970s and 1980s, more expen­sive medical technology and flaws in the health care system led to higher costs for health insurance companies. Responding to higher costs, employee benefit plans changed into managed care plans, and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) emerged. Man­aged care plans are unique in that they involve a particular network of health­care providers that have been verified for healthcare quality and that have agreements with the insurer about price and related issues. HMOs were originally primarily nonprofit, but they were quickly replaced by commercial interests, and managed care only suc­ceeded in temporarily slowing the growth of healthcare costs.

Two major changes came in the 1970s. In 1978, the federal government established what were called Professional Standards Review Organizations or PSRO. All doctors had to receive training in how to do these reviews and it was immediately apparent that cost was the only consideration, not quality of care.

I decided to educate myself and took a course from an organization called “The American Board of Quality Assurance and Utilization Review Physicians. I took the exam and passed, then attended the annual meeting. This was about 1986. People I met at that meeting informed me that the exams were graded by throwing them up in the air. Any that landed balancing on one edge were flunked. Nonetheless, the experience was valuable because I could see what was coming.

I was president of the Orange County Medical Association that year and had served for eight years on the Commission on Legislation of the CMA, now called The Council on Legislation. This gave me an opportunity to meet many legislators, many state level and some federal. The impression they made on me was that few knew anything about medicine and most were not very intelligent.

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Posting the truth on HuffPo

Thursday, November 7th, 2013

“iridium53

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I seem to recall they screwed over Dan Rather when he had actual, truthful evidence.

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This comment has been deleted.”

The comment about Dan Rather referred to the Bush AWOL story. Kevin Drum when he was the blogger on Washington Monthly, investigated that story in 2004 and concluded there was no story. Rather later went with the story on the basis of Mary Mapes and was shown to be a fool when the “memo” proved to have been written on a word processor, not in existence in 1972.

For those a little hazy on the original September 8, 2004 story, Rather and his news producers presented documents they claimed “proved” that George W. Bush went AWOL from the Guard back in the 1970s. It wasn’t long before the veracity of the documents became an issue as typography experts began to realize that the lettering used on the documents would not have been used on documents in the 1970s.

I added a reply on HuffPo that contradicted the previous comment.

It was deleted by Huff Po. They have been “moderating” my comments for a while. Now, I have apparently been banished to conservative-land.

HuffPo is no better than Talking Points Memo.

The rolling catastrophe

Monday, November 4th, 2013

Obamacare debuted on October 1. It is now November 4 and the mess is worse. I have been posting about it, here, and here, and here, and even here.

The political left is trying very hard as can be seen here.

keep-your-plan-flowchart

It’s kind of complicated so I will summarize. You are screwed !

There are accusations that insurance companies are using this to drop high risk subscribers. Maybe that is true but it is the consequence of ignorant people designing Obamacare. Did these guys ever set up a new business ? As Casey Stengel once said to the Mets , “”Can’t anybody here play this game?”

I guess not.

The New York Times has done what it can.

We are also told that “in all the furor, people forget how terrible many of the soon-to-be-abandoned policies were. Some had deductibles as high as $10,000 or $25,000 and required large co-pays after that, and some didn’t cover hospital care.” Never mind that we have seen cancellations of insurance policies with deductibles much lower, and customers forced to purchase replacement policies with higher deductibles, and with premium increases of 100%, if not higher.

Then there is this argument.

Why can’t people opt out of mental health coverage if there is not a reasonable chance that they will need that coverage? Why can’t they get mental health coverage when it is needed? After all, pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied, so in the event that mental health coverage is needed down the line, it can be obtained and the insurance companies cannot deny people who already have pre-existing mental health conditions. The Times assures us that over-coverage–and the high premiums that come with it–is “one price of moving toward universal coverage with comprehensive benefits.” They don’t explain why having unnecessary coverage is a step towards social justice, but as we saw from the beginning of this intelligence-insulting, repulsively dishonest op-ed, the New York Times is less about explaining, and more about covering up a disastrous rollout with disastrous policy consequences for the country.

Weak attempts at best.

Peggy Noonan, who has frustrated me with her obtuseness at times, gets it now.

Politically where are we right now, at this moment?

We have a huge piece of U.S. economic and social change that debuted a month ago as a program. The program dealt with something personal, even intimate: your health, the care of your body, the medicines you choose to take or procedures you get. It was hugely controversial from day one. It took all the political oxygen from the room. It failed to garner even one vote from the opposition when it was passed. It gave rise to a significant opposition movement, the town hall uprisings, which later produced the tea party. It caused unrest. In fact, it seemed not to answer a problem but cause it. I called ObamaCare, at the time of its passage, a catastrophic victory—one won at too great cost, with too much political bloodshed, and at the end what would you get? Barren terrain. A thing not worth fighting for.

So the program debuts and it’s a resounding, famous, fantastical flop. The first weeks of the news coverage are about how the websites don’t work, can you believe we paid for this, do you believe they had more than three years and produced this public joke of a program, this embarrassment?

She assumed that it wasn’t worth it if it worked !

The problem now is not the delivery system of the program, it’s the program itself. Not the computer screen but what’s inside the program. This is something you can’t get the IT guy in to fix.

They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said they would cover everyone who needed it, and instead people who had coverage are losing it—millions of them! They said they would make insurance less expensive—but it’s more expensive! Premium shock, deductible shock. They said don’t worry, your health information will be secure, but instead the whole setup looks like a hacker’s holiday. Bad guys are apparently already going for your private information.

This is the worst that could be imagined. The New York Times is trying.

We are also told that “in all the furor, people forget how terrible many of the soon-to-be-abandoned policies were. Some had deductibles as high as $10,000 or $25,000 and required large co-pays after that, and some didn’t cover hospital care.” Never mind that we have seen cancellations of insurance policies with deductibles much lower, and customers forced to purchase replacement policies with higher deductibles, and with premium increases of 100%, if not higher. Really ?

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