Category Archives: Health
Young Voter Base
The president is punishing his base. Young voters delivered for him in both elections. Their reward is to be asked to subsidize older and sicker voters through ObamaCare. It’s a scheme to spread the wealth from the relatively poor to the relatively affluent.
Can’t say he didn’t give the “young healthies” an important job. If they don’t sign up, ObamaCare could go into a death spiral. Or not.
Carl Schramm in the WSJ cites this Manhattan Institute study:
A Manhattan Institute analysis of Health and Human Services numbers notes that a 27-year-old male will pay 99% higher premiums under ObamaCare than he would under previously prevailing market rates. One reason is that the law now limits insurers to charging the sickest seniors no more than three times the amount they charge their youngest customers. Given that 64-year-olds use on average six times as much health care as 19-year-olds, the Affordable Care Act forces young people to pay considerably more than the cost of their own care.
Young men and women who pay a fine instead of buying coverage are not making an irrational choice. They know how little care they need and use. They also may be beginning to understand that the high cost of their plans reflects the redistribution of their wealth to older people and a bunch of mandated services that don’t make sense for them.
What’s in the Bill
We really shouldn’t be surprised to find out what’s in the bill.
Edie Littlefield Sundby wrote a WSJ op-ed about the ordeal of losing her health coverage. Her insurer wasn’t a “bad apple”. UnitedHealthcare spent 1.2 million for her cancer treatment. The op-ed went viral.
The journal has an editorial today suggesting that the purpose of ObamaCare is that everyone gets equal care, not 1.2 million in cancer treatment. Sounds like Edie should just take the painkiller.
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.
