Category Archives: health insurance
Too Stupid to Know What’s Good for You
Being too stupid to know what’s good for you, you bought a “substandard”, “bad apple” health care policy at an affordable price. Lucky for you, that policy has been canceled.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act you now have access to a more expensive plan with free birth control, except you’re a 60 something male with a vasectomy (which you paid for).
Bystander President
The NYT has called President Obama the bystander president because he’s deluged by events that seem to have nothing to do with him – unless they’re good. Like the U.S. oil boom which he fought against tooth and nail and now takes credit for.
Here’s a Dana Milbank Washington Post column pondering the problem.
Bystander Protector
Obama is fond of Czars. Could Valerie Jarrett be his protective Rasputin? John Fund thinks so. He quotes her appraisal of the president:
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
Says Fund, “As a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team”
Pottery Barn Rules for Health Care
Back when George W Bush was putting together his coalition of the willing, to kill people and break stuff in Iraq, Colin Powell warned they were under Pottery Barn rules: you break it you own it.
It appears that Democrats have broken the health care system. They transformed it by cramming through the Affordable Care Act, under special rules, on a Christmas Eve, with a completely partisan vote, featuring Cornhusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases. Now the thing doesn’t work.
Pottery Barn Rules
Rich Lowry says that rather than try to help fix it, Republicans should let them own it.
You Lie
I got this idea from this Holman Jenkins column in the WSJ. He thinks there is “too much incentive for Americans to over-consume health care” and that low cost high-deductible coverage might be the solution.
Obama and Democrats in general hate that idea. Jenkins quotes Hillary Clinton in 1993:
“We just think people will be too focused on saving money and they won’t get the care for their children and themselves that they need . . .
“The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better.”
IBD says the reason HillaryCare didn’t become law in 1994 was because of the “Harry and Louise” ad campaign. The Harry and Louise characters hammered home the point that they would lose their cheap insurance and be forced to buy expensive insurance, of the government’s choosing, under the Clinton plan.
That’s why Obama lied early and often that “you can keep your plan, if you like it”, under ObamaCare. Now, people who happen to like their individual catastrophic coverage are learning the truth.
You Lie
South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson was an obnoxious boor when he shouted “You lie” during President Obama’s 2009 State of the Union speech. But he didn’t lie.
Individual Insurance Mandate
A Washington Examiner poll shows that 70% of Americans want to delay the individual mandate to buy Obama approved health care. The other 30% are insurance companies. Just kidding.
But Bloomberg does report that insurance companies are absolutely positively opposed to any delay in the mandate.
Update: Here’s an IBD piece explaining how insurance companies jumped in bed with ObamaCare to produce 30 million new customers. And then got blamed as “bad apples” for canceling policies Obama doesn’t like.
