Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute maintains a healthcare blog at Forbes called The Apothecary. In a post last week, he showed how the insurance cancellations for individuals will soon be followed by cancellations for employer plans.

… Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.

“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.

Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.

How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans. …

Huffington Post wrote on the next big healthcare problem – security. This is long. We have a truncated version. Follow the link if you want it all.

Defending President Barack Obama’s much-maligned health care overhaul in Congress, his top health official was confronted Wednesday with a government memo raising new security concerns about the trouble-prone website that consumers are using to enroll.

The document, obtained by The Associated Press, shows that administration officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were concerned that a lack of testing posed a potentially “high” security risk for the HealthCare.gov website serving 36 states. It was granted a temporary security certificate so it could operate.

Security issues are a new concern for the troubled HealthCare.gov website. If they cannot be resolved, they could prove to be more serious than the long list of technical problems the administration is trying to address.

“You accepted a risk on behalf of every user…that put their personal financial information at risk,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during questioning before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “Amazon would never do this. ProFlowers would never do this. Kayak would never do this. This is completely an unacceptable level of security.” …

Here’s another left-winger; Ron Fournier on the rollout.

Insularity, incompetence, and deception doomed the launch of the Affordable Care Act, according to postmortems on President Obama’s health insurance law. The president now has two choices: A) Accept the verdict and learn from it, or B) stick with insularity, incompetence, and deception.

Early signs point to Obama compounding rather than correcting his team’s errors.

Staying the course is a losing option for Obamacare and the more than 40 million Americans who need health insurance. The trouble is far deeper than a “glitchy” website, according to numerous media reports, including an in-depth investigation by The Washington Post. Among other things, The Post uncovered a 2010 memo from a trusted outside health adviser warning that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of constructing an insurance exchange and other complexities of the 2,000-page law.

The good news is there is time to learn from–and recover from–the early stumbles. Here are four important lessons from the postmortems. 

1) Reach out beyond your inner circle. Obama ignored efforts by Harvard professor David Cutler and his own economic team to get him to appoint an outside health reform “czar” with a background in technology, insurance, and business. Instead, the president stuck with his health policy team led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, a former Clinton appointee with a checkered record in the private sector. His team was built to pass legislation, not implement it.

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” Cutler told The Post. …

One of W’s speech writers, Marc Thiessen, devotes his column to the revelation that obama’s promise about keeping your healthcare insurance was known to be a lie by him and his advisors.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news this weekend that, even as President Obama was telling the American people they could keep their health plans, “some White House policy advisors objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ promise. They were overruled by political aides.”

Overruled by political aides? This is simply damning.

It’s not easy to get a lie into a presidential speech. Every draft address is circulated to the White House senior staff and key Cabinet officials in something called the “staffing process.” Every line is reviewed by dozens of senior officials, who offer comments and factual corrections. During this process, it turns out, some of Obama’s policy advisers objected to the “you can keep your plan” pledge, pointing out that it was untrue. But it stayed in the speech. That does not happen by accident. It requires a willful intent to deceive.

In the Bush White House, we speechwriters would often come up with what we thought were great turns of phrase to help the president explain his policies. But we also had a strict fact-checking process, where every iteration of every proposed presidential utterance was scrubbed to ensure it was both accurate and defensible. If the fact-checkers told us a line was inaccurate, we would either kill it or find another way to make the point accurately. I cannot imagine a scenario in which the fact-checkers or White House policy advisers would tell us that something in a draft speech was factually incorrect and that guidance would be ignored or overruled by the president’s political advisers.

This whole episode is a window into a fundamentally dishonest presidency. …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit writes about the hubris of the political class.

Back when President Obama was first elected, the folks at Amazon offered a presidential reading list. My own recommendation for him was James Scott’s Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed. Obama should have taken it.

Scott, a Yale professor and no right-winger, produced a lengthy catalog of centrally planned disasters: Everything from compulsory villagization in Tanzania, to the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union, to the “Authoritarian High Modernism” that led to immense, unlivable housing projects and the destruction of urban life in cities around the world. The book stands as a warning to hubristic technocrats: You may think you understand how things work, and how people will respond to your carefully (or, often, not-so-carefully) laid plans, but you are likely to be wrong, and the result is likely to be somewhere between tragedy and farce. The world is more complicated than planners are capable of grasping — and so, for that matter, are the people who inhabit it.

So far, of course, the Obama administration’s health care policy hasn’t even gotten to the point of being tripped up by these sorts of issues, because, for the past month, the website hasn’t been capable of enrolling enough people to matter. But the inability of the world’s most lavishly funded government to produce a working website after more than three years of effort ought surely to encourage caution about its ability to administer the plan that the website was simply intended to enroll people for. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content.

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn has more on the rollout.

… We are assured by the headline writers that the president was “unaware” of Obamacare’s website defects, and the National Security Agency spying, and the IRS targeting of his political enemies, and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press, and pretty much anything else you ask him about. But, as he put it, “nobody’s madder than me” at this shadowy rogue entity called the “Government of the United States” that’s running around pulling all this stuff.

And, once he finds out who’s running this Government of the United States rogue entity, he’s gonna come down as hard on him as he did on that video-maker in California; he’s gonna send round the National Park Service SWAT Team to teach that punk a lesson he won’t forget.

Gloria Borger and CNN seem inclined to swallow the line that the president of the United States is not aware that he is president of the United States: for the media, just a spoonful of manure makes the Obamacare medicine go down. It remains to be seen whether the American citizenry will be so genially indulgent. Hitherto, most of what the president claims to be unaware of, they are genuinely unaware of: few people have plans to vacation in Benghazi, or shoot the breeze with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her cell phone. But Obamacare is different: whether or not the president is unaware of it, the more than two million Americans (at the time of writing) kicked off their current healthcare plans are most certainly aware of it. …

… But that’s life in the Republic of Paperwork, isn’t it? The remorseless diversion of time and energy to “futzing around.” That’s why so much of American life seems to be seizing up, why so many routine features of human existence require time-consuming bureaucracy-heavy painstaking navigation (to borrow a term from Obamacare’s “customer-service representatives”).

America would benefit from an opposition party that offered a serious de-futzing of the nation: a platform on the scale of Mrs. Thatcher’s privatization program in 1979 or Sir Roger Douglas’ in New Zealand in the Eighties that offered to make ordinary life comprehensible to non-wonks once more.

Instead, the Obama crowd have bet that, after the usual whining, you’ll settle down and get used to it: higher co-pays, higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher mountain of paperwork, higher futzing. But the fact remains that nowhere in the western world has the governmentalization of health care been so incompetently introduced and required protection by such a phalanx of lies.

Obamacare is not a left/right issue; it’s a fraud issue.

Remember Cash for Clunkers? The administration brags on that. But the Brookings Institution, a left wing think tank, says it too was a failure. Seth Mandel at Contentions has the story.

The ongoing debacle that is the administration’s rollout of ObamaCare has reignited debate about technocracy and big-government liberalism. But Democrats who worry that their mode of coercive politics will be discredited by ObamaCare should be thankful it took this long.

A very well-timed reminder of this arrived yesterday from the Brookings Institution. Scholars at the left-leaning think tank analyzed the so-called “Cash for Clunkers” program, the 2009 “stimulus” program intended to get cleaner cars on the road by providing cash vouchers for those who trade in older gas guzzlers and buy newer, more efficient cars. The administration patted itself on the back when the program ran out of money, apparently pleasantly surprised that people took free money during an economic downturn. But Brookings confirms that this was, of course, a terrible program. Here are their major findings:

The $2.85 billion program provided a short-term boost in vehicle sales, but the small increase in employment came at a far higher implied cost per job created ($1.4 million) than other fiscal stimulus programs, such as increasing unemployment aid, reducing employers’ and employees’ payroll taxes, or allowing the expensing of investment costs.

Total emissions reduction was not substantial because only about half a percent of all vehicles in the United States were the new, more energy-efficient CARS vehicles.

The program resulted in a small gasoline reduction equivalent only to about 2 to 8 days’ worth of current usage.

In terms of distributional effects, compared to households that purchased a new or used vehicle in 2009 without a voucher, CARS program participants had a higher before-tax income, were older, more likely to be white, more likely to own a home, and more likely to have a high-school and a college degree.

That last part just seems like pouring salt in the left’s wounds. Not only was the program a massive failure, but it was also, by the way, a taxpayer-funded subsidy for white homeowners– …

Seth is a free marketer. What does the liberal Washington Post say about Cash for Clunkers? They say, “Almost anything would have been better stimulus than ‘Cash for Clunkers.’”

When the Obama administration first proposed its “cash for clunkers” plan in 2009, the reaction was generally favorable. Congress would spend $2.85 billion to encourage drivers to swap their old gas-guzzlers for newer, more fuel-efficient cars.

The program had something for everyone: It would lend a hand to the ailing U.S. auto industry. It would tamp down on oil consumption. And, once launched, the program proved so popular with consumers that it burned through $1 billion in its first five days. Sure, a few critics argued that the program wouldn’t be very cost-effective, but no one was really listening.

But, as it turns out, the critics were on to something. A new analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Ted Gayer and Emily Parker found that the program was fairly inefficient as economic stimulus and mostly pulled forward auto sales that would have happened anyway. It also cut greenhouse-gas emissions a bit — the equivalent of taking up to 5 million cars off the road for a year — but at a steep cost.

“Cash for Clunkers” wasn’t good stimulus

Gayer and Parker find that Americans traded in nearly 700,000 old cars (“clunkers”) through the program between July 1 and Aug. 24, 2009. Vehicle sales did rise during that period. But a detailed study suggests that consumers just bought some cars slightly earlier than they otherwise would have. Cumulative purchases over the year were basically unchanged: …

We posted on Cash for Clunkers four years ago in August 2009. Here’s Andy McCarthy from last August 2009.

Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money — between $3500 and $4500.  How hard is that?

Pretty hard, apparently. The Washington Times reports this morning that this simple, basic Big Gummint program has spun totally out of control:  it was clearly not thought through (even a little), it was under-budgeted by 2 or 3 hundred percent (and counting), and it was woefully under-resourced — such that staff have to be hired from the outside or pulled away from other government functions (like running air-traffic control) in order to clear the back-log.  Clearing the back-log, by the way, is a 24/7 operation that’s also requiring additional budgeting for overtime pay and a training program. …

…All this from the people who, Mark Steyn reminds us this morning, tell you that the way to control healthcare costs is to set up a huge new entitlement program (even as the ones they’ve already set up sink deeper into a multi-trillion dollar sea of unfunded liabilities). Why do we trust them to do anything other than the very few things for which you actually need a government? …

Volokh Conspiracy links to a You Tube short on The Death Throes of A Corvette. The idiots of the obama administration are proud of the fact they had a program that ruined 700,000 cars and made used cars more expensive for the people they claim they want to help.

Ed Morrissey in a post, also from four years ago, says the big winners in the program were foreign auto makers.

The Obama administration spent three billion dollars subsidizing the destruction of 700,000 vehicles in order to boost car sales.  Which auto makers actually benefited from these American tax subsidies?  Reuters reports that foreign car manufacturers gained market share, while the two bailed-out American automakers lost significant portions of theirs in the big summer sale. …

… Both GM and Chrysler had curtailed their production during their bankruptcies but had worked to have inventory ready for the new sales year.  By launching C4C in the middle of the summer, when most dealers are already cutting prices to move inventory off the lot, the administration practically guaranteed that C4C would leave them on the sidelines.  Chrysler had the worst inventory problems, but GM also had serious inventory issues.  Ford, which didn’t take the bailout, had continued production and had inventory ready to sell.

Shouldn’t the owner of GM and Chrysler had known this?  Didn’t anyone on the Auto Task Force — say, Ron Bloom, the auto czar with no automaking experience — bother to check whether their companies were ready to compete in this program, and whether July was a smart time to launch this even apart from that?  This is what happens when government enters the private sector; it makes decisions based on politics rather than sound business sense, and it picks leaders based on cronyism and political payoffs rather than expertise and competence.