House of Eratosthenes

This is a post on the Hello Kitty of blogging, that was essentially a brain dump and a request for any items I might have forgotten to add. They are problems with the Affordable Care Act. Not merely arguments against, which could be refuted, or debunked, or merely disagreed-with in good faith. But actual, objectively-measured and objectively observed, hiccups. Monkey-wrenches in the works. Rake handles in the bicycle spokes.

We may disagree reasonably about whether the ObamaCare albatross will eventually generate the lift to overcome the drag. But we can’t reasonably disagree that the drag is there.

I think, based on past history, the law’s defenders will put together some highly questionable evidence that this-or-that hiccup was never there, or it’s been overcome anyway — completely ignore the other eight, and brazenly call anyone who doesn’t climb on to the ObamaCare bandwagon, a racist. Therein lies the necessity of putting together such a list.

There’s a lot more than just one problem going on.

A quick, off the cuff, very high level listing of the breakage.

1. The most obvious one, “if you like your doctor/plan you can keep your doctor/plan, period.”
2. The web site’s “shaky start.” Odd since, I think I can safely presume, the computer that monitors your logging in to the flaky-crashy ObamaCare web site, is working JUST FINE even though it’s working its way through massively, massively, massively more transactions.
3. The extra money people have to pay to stay covered. The failure to contain costs. The failure to hold up the “affordable” part of it.
4. The affordability from the perspective of the Treasury. Wasn’t so long ago this boondoggle was supposed to help balance the budget.
5. The signing-up, or lack thereof.
6. Where #5 is quantity, #6 is quality. Viability of the risk pool. Not enough young healthy people lining up to get fleeced.
7. The bait-and-switch. Hardcore leftists are already salivating for the plan to be pulled so it can be replaced with what is called “single-payer.” On the right, there is a line of thinking that this “halfway house” plan was always supposed to fail, to provide a pretext for s.p.
8. The structural stupidity of it. Problem: Too many people uncovered. Solution: Fine them for not being covered. Falls under the big umbrella of “just pass another frickin’ law…that’ll solve the problem.”
9. The unconstitutionality of it. Remember what President Obama said? It’s not a tax, it’s just a fine. And then when it went to the Supreme Court, the Supremes said: It is constitutional ONLY when it is viewed as a tax; as a fine, it is the product of Congress exceeding the limits of its regulatory authority because the transactions regulated do not constitute interstate commerce. So ObamaCare is a CONSTITUTIONAL boondoggle.

Anything I missed?

I’m most concerned about the first four. It isn’t just the web site needing some hasty patchwork. The web site’s problems represent a symptom and not a cause. This is the kind of result you get when the people in charge of something don’t know much about, or care very much about, what it takes to make something actually work.

Think about what the Amazon site does every single day.

ObamaCare reeks, both in reality and in public perception, because it is the most prominent triumph in this generation for the movement to put non-producers in charge of the producers. That’s the goal and that is the direction. People who do and build useful things other people can actually use, being told how to do it and how not to do it, by people who have never even come close to that. The results speak for themselves.

About 310 million Americans.

About 50 million lacked any coverage at all.

So 260 million Americans had insurance.

Of that 260 million, usually about 5 million were cancelled annually, prior to ObamaCare. But in 2013, that number dropped 500,000, or 10%, to 4.5 million.

Of the reduced cancellations, 4.49 million got new policies that were cheaper with better coverage. The number who could not keep their physicians we don’t know. Let’s assume the worst, that all of them had to change physicians because their physicians have no deal with their new insurance company. That means in an average year, about 5 million were forced to change physicians, but under ObamaCare, it’s fewer.

255 million kept their plans and their physicians.

Did Obama lie? To 1.9% of the people, perhaps.

Should they be unhappy that they had to change physicians, though they’re spending less money for better care?

You want cake in your beer? That’s foolish.
- edarrell | 03/16/2014 @ 18:48
Anything you missed?

Did you hit anything at all?
- edarrell | 03/16/2014 @ 18:49
Oh, good.

So ObamaCare, then, is your example of a new government program working well for people? Doing what it’s supposed to do? This is a successful effort, to you?

Let’s get this one on the record.

- mkfreeberg | 03/16/2014 @ 19:03
Mkay, while my mind is still on it.

Ten: Indirect economic impacts, which on a “high-level” list might arguably overlap with #1 and/or #3.

And eleven, separation-of-powers issue which could overlap with #9. The implementation/enforcement of ObaamaCare seems to have a lot to do with (re-)legislating. On the fly. To keep it from sucking even more.

Because of this number-eleven,, we have to take with a large grain of salt ANY statement that begins with “ObamaCare is projected/calculated to” — from both sides. We just have to wait and see what Obama wants to do with His phone-and-pen later on. Which, in a constitutional republic, is not quite how it’s supposed to work…

Now Mr. Darrell, which one of my bullet points were you trying to address? #1 I guess? Just taking the tried-and-true “I win because I said so” approach on all the others? Well, nice to know it’s really you.
- mkfreeberg | 03/16/2014 @ 19:34
It’s working much better than the Bush administration’s free prescriptions for Medicare patients — reducing the federal deficits, and fixing the problems in the Bush program.

Four million people who couldn’t afford insurance previously have stepped up to buy it, taking responsibility for improving the health of the nation. Another several million have been covered by Medicaid, reducing all of our costs. About ten million people now have comprehensive health coverage they couldn’t get previously due to pre-existing conditions. Several tens of millions more people were inoculated against flu in the last year as a result of ObamCare . . .

Yeah, it’s a winner on almost all fronts. Especially this: It pisses off those many self-hating people who hope for America to fail soon. It smokes out idiots who hate Obama more than they love America, it smokes out racists and bigots of many stripes. It exposes people who really don’t help our nation grow and thrive, so we can know who to avoid when we need patriots to trust.

Very successful.
- edarrell | 03/16/2014 @ 19:41
Okay, so noted. Add in some Darrell-rhetoric, and this plan is a good idea. Ed Darrell says this is a good plan.

I’ll keep it in mind, and encourage others to do likewise.
- mkfreeberg | 03/16/2014 @ 19:48
[…] blogger, in the comments, tells us why we should like it so […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/17/2014 @ 06:24
So let’s see here….. we’ve got a “but BOOOOOOSHHHH!”, and a “you hate America if you disagree with me.” That’s a heck of a one-two combo you’ve got there, champ. Like Muhammad Ali’s, it is.

Oh, wait, that’s not right. “Like a hysterical twelve year old girl’s” is what I meant to say.

Morgan, my friend, you really need to get a better class of trolls. Did you advertise your blog at BronyCon or something?
- Severian | 03/17/2014 @ 06:44
Something‘s going on. Not sure what.

I think they’ve just figured out how the midterms are gonna go.
- mkfreeberg | 03/17/2014 @ 06:47
That makes sense. I kinda just assumed it was that time of the month.
- Severian | 03/17/2014 @ 07:13
Ed: Four million people who couldn’t afford insurance previously have stepped up to buy it

How do you know this? How do you know their status before signing up? The government said it didn’t know in January.

When the Obama administration announced its latest set of enrollment numbers for Obamacare earlier this month, officials on a conference call did not provide information about how many people signing up for insurance under the law were previously uninsured. That information would come later, officials said, although they wouldn’t say when. Not would they explain how, exactly, the data was being tracked and measured.

And later the government admitted that tracking the uninsured signing up is not something they track now.

So I’ll ask again, how do you know how many uninsured have signed up?
- Captain Midnight | 03/17/2014 @ 08:55
OOOOOOPS.
- mkfreeberg | 03/17/2014 @ 19:04
Captain Midnight,

how do they know any of the stuff they know?

As I think Mark Twain once said (though it may be Roy Rodgers; I’m sure The Cuttlefish will be along shortly with their mad quote attributin’ skillz to set us all straight): The problem with our liberal friends isn’t what they don’t know, it’s that so much of what they do know, ain’t so.
- Severian | 03/17/2014 @ 20:55
I was pretty sure it was Kublai Khan who said that.
- mkfreeberg | 03/17/2014 @ 21:00
Severian, it was Will Rogers and Kin Hubbard, and they were talking about conservatives. https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/quote-of-the-moment-trouble-from-what-we-know-that-aint-so/
- edarrell | 03/17/2014 @ 21:45
WASHINGTON – More than 5 million people have now signed up for health insurance on marketplaces created by President Obama’s healthcare law, thanks to a surge in enrollment over the last two weeks, the Obama administration announced Monday.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-obamacare-enrollment-hits-five-million-20140317,0,7065693.story#ixzz2wHpGFu6h

Latest information shows 5 million ObamaCare signups. Much other information in that article.
- edarrell | 03/17/2014 @ 21:48
Huh. Let me reproduce the text at that link in its entirety:

It was a warning from a prophet of the past, and it applies to almost every controversy you can think of in 2011:

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

The only problem is, to whom do we attribute it? Was it Will Rogers who said, or Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard, or Artemus Ward?

Virtue may be its own reward, but ignorance costs everybody, especially when it is elected or promoted to power.

Well jeez, I’m convinced!!! It really was Will Rogers, and he was talking about conservatives.

Whereas I see the version I quoted is much more widely attributed to Ronald Reagan.

Stick to hysterical shrieking about how everyone who disagrees with you is raciss, Ed. You’re so much better at it.
- Severian | 03/17/2014 @ 21:58
How do you know this?

Figures are not perfectly concrete.

But we have no real indication they are not accurate.

From the 4.5 million cancellations, we might have had some significant overlap. But as I noted earlier, I think, that number of cancellations already is fewer than before ObamaCare. And we know that by the end of December more than 4.49 million of those cancellations had policies — and there were not 4 million people enrolled in ObamaCare then.

With a multi-million-dollar campaign against signups, spreading disinformation that even the careful readers of this blog fall victim to, it’s almost a miracle anybody signed up. Add on top of that the website difficulties and the GOP Death Panel Governors who have worked against the Medicaid expansion, knocking 30 million Americans into limbo — and we can see that things are going well, the communist/Jihadi insurgency from the GOP House notwithstanding.
- edarrell | 03/17/2014 @ 22:00
I note no one quibbles with the fact that 255 million Americans kept their policies and their physicians.

What are you carping about?
- edarrell | 03/17/2014 @ 22:01
Wait, wait, wait…. the GOP are communists now?

Sounds like you and Zachriel have a lot to argue about. Slap fight!!!!

Seriously, Morgan: Where do you get these people? Cruising My Little Pony conventions and outpatient psych clinics is no way to build up a blog’s readership, my friend.
- Severian | 03/17/2014 @ 22:10
If a private-sector insurance firm ran the way Obamacare has, it’d be defunct in short order. It’d just be a matter of what cause of death got to it first: stockholder suits, policyholder suits, state insurance license revocations, or criminal fraud cases.
- Rich Fader | 03/17/2014 @ 22:52
Anybody else notice this? Me:

…it is the most prominent triumph in this generation for the movement to put non-producers in charge of the producers. That’s the goal and that is the direction.

Ed’s pro-ObamaCare rhetoric:

With a multi-million-dollar campaign against signups, spreading disinformation that even the careful readers of this blog fall victim to, it’s almost a miracle anybody signed up. Add on top of that the website difficulties and the GOP Death Panel Governors who have worked against the Medicaid expansion, knocking 30 million Americans into limbo — and we can see that things are going well…

It is the contrast between excuses and good results. It is the vision of “success” one would expect to be embraced by non-producers who are intent on telling producers how to do their producing.

ObamaCare is a spectacle, a sample of what they consider to be a good plan yielding good results. Keep the non-producers in power, continue to enable them to tell producers how to produce, the logical outcome to expect is a lot more ObamaCares. And they’d be the first to tell you so.
- mkfreeberg | 03/18/2014 @ 04:03
Sowell:

Of course everything “works” by sufficiently low standards, and everything “fails” by sufficiently high standards.
:
Without some idea of what a person or a program is trying to do, there is no way to know whether what actually happened represented a success or a failure. When the hard facts show that a policy has failed, nothing is easier for its defenders than to make up a new set of criteria, by which it can be said to have succeeded.

So Ed’s proof that this program is a success, is that…I’m not sure. There were 4.5 million cancellations but the excuses are great? 255 million cancellations didn’t happen? It really doesn’t matter. The democrats could pass a law that turns everybody’s brain into liquid, and when questioned about it, they’d cite some studies that say humans need liquid to survive or some such…

Come to think of it, that’s more or less what’s been happening.

These people give speeches. They “win” arguments on the Internet. They do not solve actual problems. They are non-producers intent on telling the producers how to do their producing. We should expect their excuses to be compelling, convincing, passionate and wrong. Which they are.
- mkfreeberg | 03/18/2014 @ 04:35
Regret to hear your mind’s been turned to liquid, but that explains the views you express here. Diagnoses are critical to finding cures.

There were 4.5 million cancellations but the excuses are great?

In 2009, there were 5 million cancellations, and no one (especially you) said or did anything. Perhaps 2 million of those people found new policies. Can’t tell.

Under ObamaCare, cancellations fell to 4.5 million. 99% of the cancelled policies were replaced, with cheaper, better policies. 10,000 people, like you, have brains of liquid, and refused to sign on to ObamaCare out of political differences. ObamaCare can’t cover them if they won’t help themselves, so like undocumented workers, they become indigents at the expense of the rest of us. Tea Party moochers.

<blockquote:255 million cancellations didn't happen?

That’s right. Contrary to your bizarre claims, 255 million people kept their insurance plans and physicians, as Obama promised. 255 million kept promises if you were counting, which it appears you are not.

It really doesn’t matter.

Oh, it matters. But those with brains of liquid can’t tell. Never could.
- edarrell | 03/18/2014 @ 08:37
If a private-sector insurance firm ran the way Obamacare has, it’d be defunct in short order.

Morgan, where do you find these maroons?

“If the Republican Party were to run a candidate like Mitt Romney, they’d win.”

“If we just give 95% of our economy’s increase to the top 1%, we’d not have this jobless recovery.”

“If the government backs the Salk vaccine, we’ll have polio for everyone by 1970.”

Someday, I hope a Republican will read the Affordable Care Act. I’d like to have video of that.

(ObamaCare IS private sector insurance; that’s where most of the problems are. The Medicaid portion is doing well, thank you very much.)
- edarrell | 03/18/2014 @ 08:47
ed: Latest information shows 5 million ObamaCare signups.

And of those 5 million, how many of them were uninsured before? You. Don’t. Know. The government says that it doesn’t know, which makes them inept. Or it could be that the government is tracking the numbers, but they are so low that they don’t want to announce them, which makes them liars.

So which would you prefer, an inept or a lying government?

Based on past performance, I have to believe the government is lying. After all, they told us that they didn’t know how many people were signing up for Obamacare when it was later reported that they did know. And the answer was six people signed up on the first day.
- Captain Midnight | 03/18/2014 @ 09:22
ed: 99% of the cancelled policies were replaced, with cheaper, better policies.

The above is typical of the Fantasyland of liberalism. And then there’s the cold, hard slap of reality. Here are two interesting quotes from the article:

Americans buying health insurance outside the new Obamacare exchanges are being forced to swallow premiums up to 56 percent higher than before the health law took effect because insurers have jumped the cost to cover all the added features of the new Affordable Care Act.

Cheaper! Better! Wheee!

Premiums have increased by 39 percent to 56 percent, compared to pre-Obamacare coverage. As of Feb. 24, the average premium for an individual health plan selected through eHealth without a subsidy was $274 per month, a 39 percent increase over the average individual premium for pre-Obamacare coverage.

This would make the “bend the cost curve down” rhetoric either an inept idea from the get-go because the market doesn’t work that way. Or it could have been a bold-face lie used to get more votes.

So, which would you prefer, an inept or a lying government?
- Captain Midnight | 03/18/2014 @ 14:10
It’s like the object of the exercise is to make snarky comments, and to feel superior to others, as opposed to enacting policies that would help people rather than hurt people.

Explains Detroit, I suppose.
- mkfreeberg | 03/18/2014 @ 19:21

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