Category Archives: Health
Between the Ferns
In an attempt to reach his target audience of young customers for ObamaCare, the president appeared on the Zack Galifianakis show, Between Two Ferns.
The president took some flak for being unpresidential – but so what – he’s unpresidential most of the time. Here he was funny. And Galifiankis was really funny. Plus Zack is a way better pitchman for ObamaCare than Pajama Boy. Actually, he didn’t even make a pitch for the ACA. He mocked it.
Not Between any Ferns
Well, it’s all fun and games until we come to Megan McCardle’s Bloomberg analysis of the McKinsey survey of who’s actually buying ObamaCare. It’s not the previously uninsured “young invincibles”:
If the McKinsey numbers turn out to be correct, I think we should expect that the individual mandate will simply not be enforced. Otherwise, we would be “helping” the uninsured by raising the cost of the insurance available to them, and then fining them hundreds or thousands of dollars for not buying it. I believe the technical term for this is “political suicide.”
Says Jonah Goldberg, “Obamacare, was designed from the outset to screw young people, overcharging them for products they don’t need in order to subsidize older Americans.”
IRS Shared Responsibility Payment
In America we’re innocent until proven guilty. Thanks to the fifth amendment we aren’t required to testify against ourselves. That would be the same fifth amendment IRS boss Lois Lerner invoked to avoid testifying about IRS harassment of conservative groups.
As it happens, the one area where we don’t have fifth amendment protection is when it comes to reporting our obligations to the IRS.
In order to bestow on the federal government the power to force us to buy health insurance, Chief Justice Roberts deemed the penalty for not buying insurance to be a tax. That’s because while the U.S. Constitution overlooked insurance sales, it does give Congress the power to tax.
Being a tax, we are required to prove to the IRS that we don’t owe it.
IRS
To soften the blow the IRS isn’t calling this tax the Individual Mandate to Violate of Our Constitutional Rights. They are calling it your Shared Responsibility Payment. Kind of has a ring to it – the Affordable Care Act’s Shared Responsibility Payment.
Where the hell are we?
Just for the fun of it if you want to hear Obama insist again to George Stephanopoulos that the mandate isn’t a tax Click here. (You’ll have to watch a short commercial but it’s worth it.)
Harry Reid’s Horror Stories
You like your doctor but you can’t keep him. You like your insurance but you can’t keep it. ObamaCare is a train wreck.
Koch Brother Horror Stories
These horror stories are all lies, lies, and damned lies according to cowboy poet Harry Reid. They didn’t really happen to you. They were ginned up at the un-American Brothers Koch Fairy Tale mill to send red state democrats running for cover.
Where Does Wendy Stand?
Wendy Davis became famous for her pink running shoe filibuster in the Texas assembly. She was trying to stop the passage of a law to ban abortion after 20 weeks and require higher standards for abortion clinics. She claimed ignorance of the Gosnell case.
A national “Stand With Wendy” campaign erupted among the pro abortion crowd.
Wendy cashed in on her fame to run for governor. But her campaign took on water when Wayne Slater reported on her resume in the Dallas Morning News. Now she’s trying to right her ship by standing with the abortion limiting views she filibustered.
Unemployment Liberation
War is peace, freedom is slavery, and unemployment is liberation.
A new Congressional Budget Office report says ObamaCare will cost the economy 2.3 million jobs. Lower income workers will have a “disincentive to work”, as CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf put it.
“By providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income), and by making some people financially better off, the Affordable Care Act will create an incentive for some people to work less,” the report states.
The White House has embraced this. Jason Furman the chairman of the Council for Economic Advisers calls it freedom from “job lock”.
Unemployment Liberation Update:
University of Chicago Economist Casey Mulligan thinks that’s nuts:
I don’t know what their intentions are,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “but it looks like they’re trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points.
I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there’s too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that’s a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We’ve been complaining for six years now that there’s not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we’re glad that people are working less? We’re pursuing our dreams?
