Category: Health Care

On Opposing Fundamentally Flawed Ideas

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by Smitty

From the WSJ, emphasis mine:

In the latest “doc fix” for Medicare payments last week, Republicans tucked in a provision repealing an arbitrary $2,000 cap on deductibles in small-business health insurance. In a rational world beating White House industrial policy and allowing more consumer choice would qualify as a modest conservative victory. But some Republicans have convinced themselves that the only tolerable change to ObamaCare is to make it worse.

ObamaCare has never been other than a Progressive cramdown. It is the crapstone of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, represents the nadir of the 9th & 10th Amendments, and is thus the source of infinite butt-hurt.

There is no arguing with cancer itself. There is some room to discuss treatment, and the balance of treatment risks on the road to recovery.

Thus, some amount of compromise to mitigate risk of crashing the economy is certainly wise. However, that has to be undertaken with a clear vision of the long-term goal, and who is driving it. The fear with Romney, and among the reasons for his 2012 lack of traction with conservatives, was that no one believed (then or now) that he was fundamentally against the Progressive decline. Everyone (in my echo chamber anyway) felt Romney was strangely comfortable with the nanny state, and would repeal ObamaCare with much hue & cry by ripping the top page off the legislation and slapping a new cover sheet on the bureaucratic cancer.

Reform and recovery will come when we admit that Progress is toast, and it’s time for a new course for the country. The Left apparently hopes to wear down honest people with lies. Ain’t nobody got TIME for that!

Vichy GOP Skullduggery

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by Smitty

“Maybe you say it helps (Obamacare), but it really helps the small businessman,” said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., one of several physician-lawmakers among Republicans and an advocate of repeal.
No member of the House GOP leadership has publicly hailed the fix, which was tucked, at Republicans’ request, into legislation preventing a cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.
It is unclear how many members of the House rank and file knew of it because the legislation was passed by a highly unusual voice vote without debate.

Ah, the “Doc Fix”. Coburn was an apologist of sorts for the idea:

“If you vote for this bill that’s on the floor today, you’re part of the problem. You’re not part of the solution,” Coburn said. “It’s a sham, it’s a lie. The pay-fors aren’t true. It’s nothing but gimmicks. It’s corruptible. There’s no integrity in what we’re getting ready to vote on.”

The only real question remaining is whether conservatives have been foolish in trying to reform the GOP in some way, and restore it to some sort of useful state. I’m very slightly biased in favor of that sentiment, but increasingly wonder if this GOP dog can still hunt at all.

Yes, ObamaCare Kills Jobs

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File this under “Not Exactly News.” Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of basic economics understood that the complex and burdensome system of mandates in ObamaCare would impede job creation. But nothing is true until the “experts” say so, I guess:

The Republicans just got a big gift from the Congressional Budget Office: It’s going to be a lot easier for them to call Obamacare a “job killer.”
That’s because the budget office’s new economic report, released Tuesday, says the health care law will cause Americans to work fewer hours — enough to be the equivalent of 2 million fewer jobs in 2017.
The latest number is nearly three times as high as the budget office’s previous prediction, and it’s supposed to rise in later years to the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024. . . .
The projection will put the White House, and especially red-state Democrats, in an even more awkward position heading into November. Until now, they’ve mostly had to worry about stories of canceled health plans and, of course, the botched website rollout. Now they’ll need to figure out how to counter, or at least explain, the new CBO job figures.

There are two Americas. In one America, people understand economics. In the other America, people vote for Democrats.

It might help to read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. Just sayin’ . . .

 

Justices Impersonating Accountants

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by Smitty

Kagan went on to say that other U.S. businesses are “voluntarily” dropping their health insurance coverage for employees.
“You know Hobby Lobby is paying something right now for the — for the coverage,” Kagan said. “It’s less than what Hobby Lobby is paying for the coverage. There are employers all over the United States that are doing this voluntarily.”
Chief Justice Roberts interjected that this was in opposition to what Hobby Lobby presented in its lawsuit.
“I thought — I thought that part of the religious commitment of the owners was to provide health care for its employees,” Roberts said and Clements agreed.
“Well, if they want to do that, they can just pay a greater salary and let the employees go in on the exchange,” Sotomayor said.

Listen Sotomayor and Kagan, you brace of bimbos: you can slap a “Constitutional” label on the homesick abortion that is ObamaCare, but you can’t stop it from making you look like clueless idiots. How Hobby Lobby does its accounting is irrelevant to the truth that the law you found Constitutional is a steaming crock.

Maybe you think that you can wear down the resolve of the American people.

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Train them to dig life on your Progressive Plantation. But will “elections have consequences” in November? Over time, are we allowed to repent of the abject foolishness that has allowed DC to accrue too much power over every aspect of life?

Or are you just going to ignore what happens, should the GOP retake Congress? Are we going to see more attacks on the Koch brothers and the Tea Parties, as our the Godless Commies who are our purported betters undertake “shaping operations” in order to train us to love Progress?

And do read the ObamaCare blog comment of the day. This thing is a virulent cancer. The GOP had better not harbor hope of making peace with it.

Related, via Hot Air Quotes of the Day:

“One religious group could opt out of this and one religious group could opt out of that, and everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform,” Kagan warned. “Religious objectors would come out of the woodwork.”

In other words, kind of like the Amish, or Congress:

Along with eschewing cars and many other modern technologies, the descendants of 18th-Century German immigrants who practice the Amish and Old Order Mennonite religions, have effectively opted out of Obamacare, along with most federal safety net programs.
A little-known provision of the law with its roots in a 1950s battle over Social Security exempts these communities from the individual mandate, an element of the Affordable Care Act that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance in some form.

I guess Kagan’s point is to warn that our Balkanized system could get kinda fragmented, or something. WHY ARE WE PAYING THIS IDIOT?

Repealing ObamaCare Is Scary To Gutless Progressives Fearing Reform

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by Smitty

What is different about Republican calls for repeal today — as opposed to calls for repeal from 2010 to the end of 2013 — is that Obamacare is now in place. It exists. Exchanges are running — many of them badly, but running. subsidies are being paid. Insurance companies have changed the way they do business. Medicaid has been expanded. Special taxes are being collected.

Even though the system is new, millions of Americans have gone to a lot of trouble to adjust to it, and it would be disruptive to them to just stop cold. Halt subsidies? Undo Medicaid expansion? Just as last fall, when millions of Americans received coverage cancellation notices, millions more would face new burdens under the repeal of Obamacare.

Oh, so the camel’s nose is under the tent, the first dope hit was free, and the bint was asking for it?

These problems can melt away with the courage of honesty. Stand there and tell the truth that ObamaCare has been false at every stage of its misbegotten existence, from the prosecutorial lynching of Ted Stevens on. Just list the play-by-play of the shenanigans that occurred. Reiterate the economic damage. Build the case that ObamaCare is the Battle of the Progressive Bulge, and here is where we turn back the (inter)National Socialists.
Via Marshall Locke, we have Arthur Brooks:

I hear Brooks’s point: you have to care about people, both in an immediate sense, and in the long term sense. People, particularly the unreflective, live in the present tense. Pondering life in greater depth is something you do as you grow. However, Progressivism is your eternal bureaucratic diaper. Just vote for more Huggies.

The challenge for the conservatives is to goad the GOP into a national poddy training program, so that future generations can return to wearing big boy pants.

More specifically, the GOP needs to do this by

  • budgeting
  • driving toward a balanced budget
  • cutting the Progressive cord, and letting the states own their own safety net programs, as lean or as lavish as they care to pay for

The real requirement, though, is the leadership. The rejection of Progressive homo beaurocratus as an ideal. We could be deep in the hurt locker here.

Obama’s Part-Time Proletariat

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Victims of Obamanomics:

Having worked as a nurse’s aide for 15 years, Ms. McCurdy has been among the nearly 25 million workers in the United States who make less than $10.10 an hour — the amount to which President Obama supports increasing the minimum wage. Of those workers, 3.5 million make the $7.25 federal minimum wage or less.
And like many of them, Ms. McCurdy hasn’t been able to rely on steady full-time hours — she has often been assigned just 20 hours a week. Even if she worked full time year-round, her $9 hourly wage would put her below the poverty threshold of $19,530 for a family of three.

If the economy were in recovery, as Democrats insist, the increasing demand for labor would offer better employment opportunities for everyone. But we all know this is not true and, absent real recovery, Democrats instead want to impede economic growth by the job-killing method of increasing the minimum wage. They propose this increase not for any economic reason, but for the political purpose of maneuvering Republicans into voting against it.

Yet an important question to be answered is, why do so many low-wage workers find themselves stuck with part-time jobs?

Most commentators viewed the February jobs report released on March 7 as good news, indicating that the labor market is on a favorable growth path. A more careful reading shows that employment actually fell — as it has in four out of the past six months and in more than one-third of the months during the past two years.
Although it is often overlooked, a key statistic for understanding the labor market is the length of the average workweek. Small changes in the average workweek imply large changes in total hours worked. The average workweek in the U.S. has fallen to 34.2 hours in February from 34.5 hours in September 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That decline, coupled with mediocre job creation, implies that the total hours of employment have decreased over the period. . . .
The decline in the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by 3/10ths of an hour — offset partially by the increase in the number of people working — means that real labor usage on net, taking into account hours worked, fell by the equivalent of 100,000 jobs since September. . . .

And why is this?

Another possibility for the declining average workweek is the Affordable Care Act. That law induces businesses with fewer than 50 full-time employees — full-time defined as 30 hours per week — to keep the number of hours low to avoid having to provide health insurance. The jury is still out on this explanation, but research by Luis Garicano, Claire LeLarge and John Van Reenen (National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2013) has shown that laws that can be evaded by keeping firms small or hours low can have significant effects on employment.

ObamaCare is killing Hope. We need a Change.

 

Actual GOP Leadership On Display

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by Smitty

In stark contrast to the Vichy GOP propping up the wrong side of history, here we have a clip of Ted Cruz telling a smarmy little mongrelish semihuman reporter that, if the will of the people is expressed strongly enough, Democrats could in fact put a stake in the undead heart of ObamaCare:

We must all respect the calmness with which Ted Cruz treats Beltway wisdom like a urinal cake.

via Rare

UPDATE: Ted Cruz differentiates himself from Rand Paul on foreign policy. I don’t think there is a substantial difference between their views; it’s mostly stylistic. In reality, international power abhors vacuum, and the U.S. either fills that void, or stands by like a gaping Obama while less savory figures like Putin do.

What truly inspires about Cruz, however, is his rhetorical command. Stacy McCain says, and all of these blow-dried codpiece media idiots do, “The only way that a journalist should look at a politician is down the nose.” Cruz, however, is completely undaunted by any of them. Either his legal training or his debate practice (or both) seem to enable Cruz to play verbal chess three moves ahead of whatever buffoon is trying for a piece of him.

Truly inspiring stuff.

Even A River Of Lies Cannot Flow Uphill

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by Smitty

Look: Progress is dead. The final piece of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights arrived, and it was a river of lies, with headwaters in hell.

It’s the law of the land, they tell us, passed fair and square by both houses of Congress, crowned as constitutional by the highest court of the country, and ratified by the people in Obama’s reelection. They note that other historic reforms—Medicare, Social Security—had troubled beginnings and then were embraced by the nation, and that even the Civil Rights Act of 1964, preceded by outbreaks of terrible violence, was accepted quite quickly once passed.

Not so with Obamacare, to which resistance over time has only grown stronger. “Current and former administration officials .??.??. have been surprised at how steadfast the opposition has remained,” the Washington Post reported last summer, quoting MIT economist Jonathan Gruber saying, “It used to be you had a fight and it was over, and you moved on.” But few have moved on, for reasons which are not all that hard to tease out: It’s not working out, in fact it’s a disaster; it’s blowing holes in the federal budget; the win-to-lose balance is way out of kilter, as many more people are hurt than helped by it. Obamacare may collapse on its own for practical reasons, but there is a fourth strike against it that adds a dimension of weakness no comparable measure has faced: Much of the country believes it’s a fraud, passed dishonestly, and not deserving of moral authority. In short, they find it nearly illegal, highly immoral, and possibly fattening. And their minds won’t be changed.

Read the whole thing. The notion of there being a “law of the land”, itself, is being destroyed by this evil. As ancient commenter Madison noted:

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Not that Madison was a prophet, or anything. He merely had more common sense than Princess Pelosi and Harry “the Cadaver” Reid combined.

via Hot Air