Obamascare
Health insurance rates are taking off under Obamacare, especially if you now carry a high deductible plan. Kathleen Sebelius agrees.
“Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don’t pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus,” she said. “They’re really mortgage protection, not health insurance.”
Megan McCardle at the Daily Beast thinks Sebelius is confused about what insurance is.
Sebelius’ response is apparently that catastrophic insurance isn’t really insurance at all–which is exactly backwards. Catastrophic coverage is “true insurance”. Coverage of routine, predictable services is not insurance at all; it’s a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan.
“This is not insurance anymore. This is regulation, this is government dictated rates, like the electrical company…”
North Korean Diplomacy
The new Dear Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, wasn’t mollified by Dennis Rodman’s recent mission to his country. The young -un says the time has come to “settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists”. Settlement terms include hitting targets in Hawaii, Guam, and the US homeland.
The threats may be more to impress Lil’ Kim’s own low information constituents.
Cartoonish efforts by world leaders please me. I haven’t been so pleased since Bibi’s Iran nuclear graph.
Same Sex Supreme Court
Justice Kennedy isn’t homophobic, he’s Roe v Wade-phobic. He think’s “a democracy should not be dependent for its major decisions on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say”.
Which is what happened in the Roe v Wade decision. Attitudes toward abortion were already changing and Justice Ginsburg says the court went “too far and too fast“ in removing the issue from the political process. Anger and frustration rages over abortion today with many attitudes shifting back the other way.
But nobody likes an abortion. Everybody loves a wedding.
Obama Bahama
The Obama girls are spring breaking at Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas. It’s the fourth Obama vacation of the new year. Meanwhile the White House remains closed to school children on spring break.
One link down on the royal food chain, Joe Biden blew half a million a night on hotels in London and Paris plus $320,000 on carfare – about the same amount the senate barber shop loses every year.
John Stossel thinks Washington has become an imperial city. He claims that 43% of the top 1% live in the Washington area, feeding off taxpayers. “It’s very much like Versailles before the French Revolution,” says historian John Steele Gordon
