Author: Papa Giorgio

Designed to Fail In Order to Push Single-Payer System

Published by Papa Giorgio

HotAir on this medicaid expansion:

CBS News has confirmed that in Washington, of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled, 87 percent signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, out of 26,000 new enrollments, 82 percent are in Medicaid. And in New York, of 37,000 enrollments, Medicaid accounts for 64 percent. And there are similar stories across the country in nearly half of the states that run their own exchanges. …

But Gail Wilensky, a former Medicaid director, said the numbers are causing concern in the insurance industry, which needs healthy adults to buy private insurance in large numbers for the system to work.

“Either the private insurance enrollments come up somewhere around the expected amount or there’s going to be a problem. … You need a volume and you need a mix of people that are healthy as well as high users in private insurance, in order to have it be sustainable,” she said.

The Obama administration says they expected these high enrollment numbers in Medicaid because the law expands the number of low-income people who can get Medicaid, CBS News’ Jan Crawford reported on “CBS This Morning.” Supporters say this shows demand. But industry sources say that if we do not see some real turnaround soon, there could be big problems for the entire system.

The above graphic is from a WaPo article, continuing with HotAir’s commentary on the above quoting from CBS:

This prompts a question: why didn’t Democrats just expand Medicaid? Of the 30-48 million of the uninsured in America (depending on estimates), those uninsured and making less than $50,000 in household income only came to somewhere between 8 and 14 million, according to the Census Bureau in 2009. Eighty-five percent of Americans had insurance, and 87% of those were satisfied with it. Expanding Medicaid would have been costly and wouldn’t have been an easy sale — as we see with Republican governors now — but it would have been far less costly and intrusive as the Rube Goldberg contraption built by Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats, and it would have narrowly targeted the problem.

I have pointed this out before… single-payer is the goal:

An after thought. Since the DNC leadership has said — recently — the goal is single-payer… the question becomes this then: “what other area of life would a person want single payer in?” The airlines? Fast-food? Grocery stores? Car dealers? Education? Gyms?

In other words, why would someone reject a single airline, a single grocery-store (sorry weekend BBQ’ers, no more carne-asada from Vallerta), one gym, etc. — competition drives prices down and offers the best way (supply and demand) to get to the consumer what they want… but reject all that for a system that is failing in Canada, Britain, and the like?

It seems counter-intuitive that the left likes to break up large companies/corporations that get too big, and speak about/to the “evils” large companies inflict on the consumer, but then want single-payer. Odd indeed.

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Megyn Kelly Grilled Ezekiel Emanuel, One of the Architects of the Affordable Care Act

Published by Papa Giorgio

Video Description:

Megyn Kelly took on Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, on Friday night, grilling him on the colossal trainwreck of the health care law’s rollout and asking whether President Obama’s failed promises were “intentionally misleading or grossly mistaken.” Kelly told her all the issues with insurance companies restructuring plans and employers altering policies were “foreseeable,” and argued a minimum floor of coverage might not sit well with some people. Emanuel shot back that the main thrust of the Obamacare law is to cover millions more people, saying the GOP “never had a coherent plan or alternative.” Emanuel argued employers cut back on coverage en masse under Bush, but Kelly said there are still plenty of issues with Obamacare, like young people not signing up and the “huge swelling of the Medicaid rolls.” Emanuel dismissed the numbers already coming out as “totally irrelevant,” shouting “You have no idea whether you’re on track or not!” Kelly shot back, “Kathleen Sebelius won’t tell me!”

The Counter Culture vs. God ~ A Skateboarding Magazine Tells Its Readers to Steal

Published by Papa Giorgio

The above comes from the April 2013 (vol 31) Transworld Skateboarding magazine. They are effectively telling its readers to steal from someone they love, thus breaking a commandment they picture in the magazine. Many in this generation do not know the full impact of these commandments and the entirety of a life lived… a life lived well that is.  As an ex-three-time felon, I know how hard it is to live a life well in God’s eyes… and I couldn’t do it at all without His daily help.

Let us just peruse some commentary on Commandment number eight from a few different sources:

There is only one solution to the world’s problems, only one prescription for producing a near-heaven on earth. It is 3,000 years old. And it is known as the Ten Commandments.

Properly understood and applied, the Ten Commandments are really all humanity needs to make a beautiful world. While modern men and women, in their hubris, believe that they can and must come up with new ideas in order to make a good world, the truth is there is almost nothing new to say.

If people and countries lived by the Ten Commandments, all the great moral problems would disappear.

Or, to put it another way, all the great evils involve the violation of one or more of the Ten Commandments.

8. Do not steal.

This commandment prohibits the stealing of people, the stealing of property, and the stealing of anything that belongs to another. The first prohibition alone, if obeyed, would have rendered the slave trade impossible.

Protecting the sanctity of private property makes moral civilization possible. That is why the recent riots in London should frighten every citizen of the U.K. and the West generally. Just as the burning of books leads to the burning of people, so, too, the smashing of windows and the looting of property leads eventually to the smashing of heads.

The rampant violation of this commandment by the governments of Africa is the primary reason for African poverty. Corruption, not Western imperialism, is the root of Africa’s backwardness.

(Prager)

There are also economic systems in mind all-thru-out the Bible, and they do not — even the eighth commandment — support socialism as an economic system.

Will Obama Be Held Accountable by the Reasonable Left?

Published by Papa Giorgio
Who Believes This?

“Not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t” ~ Obama

Held Accountable? Remember this?

According to Justice Roberts and four other Supremes (not the musical group), it is a tax:

The individual mandate requiring Americans to carry insurance or pay a fine was clearly a constitutional nightmare. But, in an act of utter desperation, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Supreme Court’s 4 Liberal justices in ruling that the mandate was legal under Congress’ constitutional authority “to collect Taxes” to provide for “the general Welfare of the United States.”

In an interview, in 2009, President Obama insisted that the mandate was not a tax, and that he wasn’t breaking his pledge not to increase taxes on the middle class by implementing the mandate.

 How bout this one?

Well… more people have had their insurance dropped because of O-Care in just three states than all people who have — so far — signed up for O-Care nation wide. Sick! Here are just some specified examples:

CareFirst says 76,000 customers will lose current coverage due to Obamacare

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield is being forced to cancel plans that currently cover 76,000 individuals in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., due to changes made by President Obama’s health care law, the company told the Washington Examiner today.

That represents more than 40 percent of the 177,000 individuals covered by CareFirst in those states.

Though Obama famously promised that those who liked their health care coverage could keep it under his program, in reality, the health care law imposes a raft of new regulations on insurance policies starting Jan. 1 that are forcing insurers across the country to terminate existing plans.

In theory, rules were supposed to allow pre-existing plans to be “grandfathered in,” but they were written so narrowly that they leave out many plans.

“Of the 177,000 individuals under age 65 who are covered by CareFirst, about 76,000 of them are in a non-grandfathered plan — a plan that will not comply with the guidelines imposed by the Affordable Care Act at their time of renewal this year or next,” CareFirst said in an email in response to an inquiry by the Examiner….

CBS Video: Obamcare Takes Away Woman’s Health Care Choices

(CBS)

….”I was completely happy with the insurance I had before,” Willes said.

So she was surprised when she tried to renew her policy. What did she find out?

“That my insurance was going to be completely different, and they were going to be replaced with 10 new plans that were going to fall under the regulations of the Affordable Care Act,” she said.

Her insurer, Kaiser Permanente, is terminating policies for 160,000 people in California and presenting them with new plans that comply with the healthcare law.

“Before I had a plan that I had a $1,500 deductible,” she said. “I paid $199 dollars a month. The most similar plan that I would have available to me would be $278 a month. My deductible would be $6,500 dollars, and all of my care after that point would only be covered 70 percent.”

Millions of Americans Are Losing Their Health Plans Because of Obamacare

…roughly 16 million Americans will lose their current plans because of Obamacare:

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.

These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law’s benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.

You Can Keep Your Health Insurance Under Obamacare? Not So Much

Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.

Will the reasonable Left in this country stand up? Already, every Democrat (yes, EVERY) running for reelection in 2014 is FOR suspending O-care temporarily. An admission — of sorts — of its failure and the sense that the American public rejects O-Care… even in Blue districts.

UPDATED! John McAfee on ObamaCare Software

Published by Papa Giorgio

Always Fails

“Central planning is a bureaucratic nightmare” ~ Hayek (get)

See Hayek, Above

Even I couldn’t log on to Healthcare.gov ~ Obamacare contractor (see)

Via Libertarian Republican:

No one even considered the scenario we are now seeing: a partially working system in which it is difficult to sign up but not impossible. This means that the most motivated consumers (the sickest) are likely to persevere in creating accounts, while the younger and healthier are more likely to skip an unpleasant process and risk a minimal fine.  “If they don’t get the necessary volume and demographic mix in the exchanges,” Yuval Levin of National Affairs told me, “it could set off a catastrophic adverse selection spiral that would not only render the exchanges inoperable but badly damage our large health care systems.”

But the failed rollout has already raised ideological issues of broader significance. It has reinforced a widely held, pre-existing belief that government-run health systems are bureaucratic nightmares. And it has added credence to the libertarian argument that some human systems are too complex to be effectively managed. Perhaps the problem with Obamacare is not failed leadership, but the whole project of putting a federal agency, 55 contractors and 500 million lines of software code in charge of a health system intended to cover millions of Americans. 

I am not a libertarian who argues against the need for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But Friedrich Hayek has this much going for him: He understood that the challenge of technocratic planning is always limited information. “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

Via NewsBusters:

MSNBC’s Chris Jansing brought software expert Luke Chung onto Thursday’s Jansing & Co. to analyze the federal government’s troubled healthcare.gov website. Chung, the founder and president of software and database programming company FMS, served up a scathing indictment of the website that left Jansing reeling at certain points during the interview. [See video below the break. MP3 audio here.]

Jansing started by asking how complicated it was to get healthcare.gov up and running. Chung was very frank with her: “I don’t know why they made it so complicated. This really shouldn’t be that difficult.” Jansing fumbled around, talking about other countries and states that have launched similar programs before playing administration advocate…

[….]

Later, Chung eviscerated CGI, the IT company hired by the government to develop healthcare.gov: “This was built, I think, by people who were never paid before to create software. I think they just got out of school or something. You know, these government contractors, they win these contracts and then they’re incentivized to deliver the cheapest people possible to meet the minimum requirements.”

Chung bluntly put the website problems in perspective: “I mean, this is not rocket science. We’re not curing cancer, we’re not providing any health care, we’re not even providing health insurance. We’re filling out a paper form. Not that hard.”

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Via MoonBat:

HotAir has this:

There’s a growing consensus on the mid- to late-November time frame by which the Obama administration really, really needs to have ObamaCare’s online portal running smoothly to avoid inducing more death-spiral risks and subsequent industry panic, and all of their plans for public outreach and directing people to call centers and whatnot is only going to get them so far.

“Tech surge” or no tech surge, CNN reports that still more experts and computer engineers are piling on to the suggestion that fixing HealthCare.Gov’s major problems before the end of 2013 just isn’t a feasible task, and that rebuilding the system from scratch would be the administration’s easiest and safest bet:

After assessing the website, Dave Kennedy, the CEO of information-security company Trusted Sec, estimates that about 20% of Healthcare.gov needs to be rewritten. With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.

… Nish Bhalla, CEO of information-security firm Security Compass, said it “does not sound realistic at all” that Healthcare.gov will be fully operational before that point.

“We don’t even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?” Bhalla said. “It’s like a drive-by shooting: You’re going fast and you might hit it, you might miss it. But you can’t fix what you can’t identify.” …

“Projects that are done rapidly usually have a lot of [repetitive] code,” said Arron Kallenberg, a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. “So when you have a problem, instead of debugging something in a single location, you’re tracking it down all through the code base.”

A whopping 500 million lines of code is “so excessive,” says Kennedy, and that a more normal number for a project like the ObamaCare site would lie somewhere in the range of 25 million to 50 million. Dayum.

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Blatant Bias 101

Published by Papa Giorgio

This example comes via NewsBusters:

Last Thursday and Friday, the Washington Post’s Express tabloid showed a major contrast between a GOP elephant waving a white flag, and then Vice President Joe Biden triumphantly handing out muffins at the post-shutdown EPA.

Another, even stronger contrast emerged on the news stands of DC on Tuesday and Wednesday after it became apparent to absolutely everyone that the Obamacare website was a fiasco. Obama was a cheerleader on Tuesday; on the next day, the Republican elephant was dead or dying.

On Tuesday, the cover headline was “Commander Performance: The president delivers a spirited sales pitch for Obamacare as criticism of its deeply flawed rollout mounts.” Inside, the headline was “Search for a Cure: Obama says the health-care site will be fixed, as problems mount.”

The story began began “President Barack Obama gave a consumer-friendly defense [?] of the health-care law Monday” and the event “had the feel of a health-care pep rally.” They cited ABC-Washington Post poll numbers that 56 percent believe the website’s tech problems reflect a larger problem with Obamacare, but “more Americans also support the law despite the enrollment issues, with 46 percent saying they support the law now, compared with 43 percent who said so last month.”

On Wednesday, the cover headline was “Free Fallin’: Who suffered the most from  the government shutdown? Poll results show the biggest loser is the Republican Party. Inside, the headline was “GOP Feels Shutdown Hangover: Poll finds major damage to the party as it wrestles with its future direction.”

As Scott Whitlock noticed in the regular paper, the Post wants readers to know “just how badly the GOP hardliners and leaders who went along with them misjudged the public mood,” while “President Obama’s overall ratings have held steady. Almost half of all Americans approve of the way he has handled his job.” It left out that more disapprove: it’s 48 percent approve to 49 percent disapprove among all adults, and among registered voters, it’s 46 percent approve to 51 percent disapprove.

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I love this reporter… he ends with “I am not an advocate”! Awesome!

  • PBS Host Calls MSNBC Anchor and MSNBC Contributors ‘Advocates’ – To Their Faces