Lies on Lies on Lies



Obama was in Boston this week, attempting to deflect attention from his key O'Care sales pitch promise that Americans could keep their insurance and doctors, “period” – a remark even the Washington Post classified as a “WHOPPER.” Obama doubled down on the lie: “If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law and you really liked that plan, you're able to keep it. That's what I said when I was running for office. That was part of the promise we made.”

Analysts now believe that more than 90 million plans are at risk of alteration or cancelation, both individual and corporate policies, and that this information was known to the administration in 2010. The lie just keeps getting bigger.

Back in Washington, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama bureaucrat directly responsible for the failed launch of ObamaCare, was planting prevarications before Congress.

Sebelius admitted that the Healthcare.gov rollout was “miserably frustrating” and said, “I'm responsible.” She then proceeded to deny responsibility, and even repeated her boss's lie about consumers being able to keep their health plan if they like it. Period. She argued, “[I]f a plan was in place in March of 2010 and, again, did not impose additional burdens on the consumer, they still have it. It's grandfathered in.” She complained that, before ObamaCare, the insurance market was “unregulated.” That's patently false, and, of course, those pesky “additional burdens” – like mandatory maternity coverage even for single men – were placed on insurance companies by HHS and ObamaCare regulations. So much for accountability.



Sebelius also told Congress, “The website [Healthcare.gov] never crashed. It is functional, but at a very slow speed and very low reliability.” But when she was asked to disclose the enrollment numbers, she replied, “The system isn't functioning, so we are not getting that reliable data.” Her flip-flop is hardly surprising, but concerning her original comment, the system's constant failure is one of the primary reasons she was on Capitol Hill, not to mention the reason that the majority of consumers have been unable to enroll. Additionally, her statement was made all the more ironic considering the site crashed moments before Sebelius began her remarks. Half an hour into her testimony, the exchange was still dead in the water. (For the record, CBS reveals that only 6 individuals successfully enrolled within the first 24 hours of the exchange's launch.)

Yet another laughable moment came when Sebelius insisted that it would be “illegal” for her to obtain insurance coverage through the exchanges. There are, however, just three requirements listed on Healthcare.gov for purchasing a plan on an exchange: Buyers “must live in the United States”; “must be a U.S. citizen or national (or be lawfully present)”; and “can't be currently incarcerated.”

The secretary didn't even know whether Healthcare.gov is a secure website. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former FBI agent specializing in electronic security issues, chastised Sebelius and by extension, Obama, for the lack of security at Healthcare.gov: “You allowed this system to go forward with no encryption on backup systems. They have no encryption on certain boundary crossings. You accepted a risk on behalf of every user [and] put their personal financial information at risk because you did not have even the most basic end to end test on security of this system.” As The Patriot noted months ago, one of the liabilities that will plague Democrats who supported ObamaCare is the fact that it will be an easy mark for ID theft.

ObamaCare is also proving to be the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in our country's history. The Medicaid sign-up portal is not only signing folks up for subsidized health care, but to vote! Under current federal law (“Motor Voter”), when someone goes to the DMV for a driver's license, he or she is asked whether or not they want to register to vote. Under the ObamaCare application process, if you apply for Medicaid, you are automatically registered to vote unless you opt out (by completing a form designed to unduly complicate the process).

Finally, as we've said before, while Sebelius is indeed responsible for much of the current debacle, to suggest she should resign implies that a better HHS secretary might have made it work. Fact is, the failure of the rollout is but a metaphor for the reality that a government bureaucracy can't even effectively manage a basic commerce website for insurance comparisons – much less an enterprise that encompasses 18% of the U.S. economy.

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None dare call it tyranny

Intimidation.  It is an ugly word bringing to mind mobsters threatening to burn down a shop owners store if he doesn’t buy fire insurance, or a loan shark enforcers breaking legs to send a message to someone who bet the wrong horse.

It is even uglier when it is used in conjunction with the Presidency in a nation that has historically prided itself as being above the raw use of power to achieve one’s political ends.

CNN, one of the most vocal supporters of President Obama and his policies reported on October 30, that health insurers which are now heavily regulated under Obamacare “feared retribution” if they expressed their displeasure with the rollout of Obamacare.  Fearing retribution and not taking an action due to that fear is almost a classic definition of successful intimidation.

CNN News Anchor Carol Costello reported that she felt intimidated when reporting on the presidential race saying, “I mean President Obama’s people can be quite nasty. They don’t like you to say anything bad about their boss, and they’re not afraid to use whatever means they have at hand to stop you from doing that, including threatening your job [emphasis added].”

Now, Costello never claimed to have changed any story she produced as a result of this atmosphere of intimidation, but it is hard to imagine many reporters not choosing to present the campaign party line rather than give a more balanced perspective when their very jobs may have been at risk.

Earlier in October, an award winning freelance journalist who had written exposes about malfeasance at the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Safety Administration found her home raided by a combination of Maryland State Troopers and DHS agents over allegations that she had purchased a potato launcher over the Internet five years prior.  Apparently, the anti-potato launcher section of Homeland Security decided that a nice 4:30 am raid of the reporter’s home was needed five years after the purchase which was apparently illegal in Maryland, but legal under federal law.

While Marylanders were made safe from random potato attacks, DHS officials made off with all of the reporters notes on the TSA case, including the names of the whistleblowers who unveiled the illegal activity.

The Washington Times Editor John Solomon promised legal action against DHS stating, “While we  appreciate law enforcement’s right to investigate legitimate concerns, there is no reason for agents to use an unrelated gun case to seize the First Amendment protected materials of a reporter.”

Solomon continued by arguing, “This violates the very premise of a free press, and it raises additional concerns when one of the seizing agencies was a frequent target of the reporter’s work.”

In the months prior, the Obama Administration’s Justice Department admitted that they had tapped the phones of Associated Press reporters for months in an attempt to find reporter’s sources.

The Obama Administration even has gone so far as to contend that Fox News Washington’s James Rosen aided and abetted a breach of national security for doing his job and reporting information provided to him by a government official.  Unlike some cases in the past where reporters were put in jail for contempt of court for refusing to name a source, Rosen has come under legal jeopardy for simply reporting a story.

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza succinctly summed up the abuse of government power tweeting, “If James Rosen’s ‘clandestine communications plan’ were illegal, every journalist in Washington would be locked up. Unreal.”

With this history can anyone still be surprised at Obama’s use of the IRS and other agencies of the federal government to intimidate political foes?

Can anyone remain naïve enough to believe that actions taken against True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht by the IRS, OSHA and ATF was anything but a coordinated federal government wide effort to shut her up.  The inter-agency assault on Engelbrecht could only have been directed from the one place that breaks down the barriers between federal government agencies — the White House.

Intimidation is a standard tactic in NASCAR, the NFL, Major League Baseball, and most sporting events.  It is even attempted when elected officials try to stare down each other and interest groups with threats, voiced or veiled, of future ramifications for political actions.

But the brazen intimidation of the media and political opponents by this Administration goes far beyond the always implied threat that if I don’t like the story you write, I won’t give you the next one, to direct threats against one’s livelihood and indeed, freedom.

In America there is no place for raiding reporter’s homes, bugging their phones and threatening to indict them in order to obtain their sources.  The sanctity of a reporter’s source is well established in our nation’s courts, yet in Obama’s America, whistleblowers are nothing more than ducks in a shooting gallery.  This doesn’t just chill the ability of reporters to get information from the inside of government, but puts it in a deep freeze, because no whistleblower can ever again expect his or her anonymity to be protected, and without that protection, information dries up.

In Obama’s America, the Internal Revenue Service becomes what everyone has always feared, an Agency that selectively enforces the law based upon the politics of those in power.

None dare call it tyranny, but when freedom of the press comes under wholesale attack, and a government uses its vast resources to assault and intimidate its political enemies, what you call it really just comes down to semantics.

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Jay Carney Berates Insurance Companies For Complying With Obamacare

Speaking to reporters Tuesday White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blamed loss of healthcare coverage for millions of Americans on insurance companies complying with the Affordable Care Act.

"Insurers pulled those plans away from them," Carney said. "The law [Obamacare] could not order insurers not to cancel that plan."

Millions of health insurance plans are no longer available because they do not meet Obamacare standards and regulations. Carney's comments come less than 24 hours after information surfaced showing President Obama knew millions of Americans would be losing their health insurance plans under Obamacare despite promising, "If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what."

When pressed on the issue of millions losing individual insurance plans they wanted to keep, Carney said it is five percent of the population being affected by insurance loss. That five percent adds up to 14 million people.

"We're talking about 5% of the country," Carney said after justifying losses and referring to the individual marketplace as a "wild west" that needed more regulation.

Now that the Obama administration is taking heat from all sides on the loss of insurance, the White House is pivoting back to blaming insurance companies for the loss of those plans, not Obamacare itself, which makes millions of plans illegal.

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Court Rules Obama Admin Can’t Make Catholic Family Business Follow contraception Mandate

A powerful federal appeals court ruled today that a Catholic family-run business does not have to comply with the Obamacare abortion mandate requiring it to pay for birth control and drugs that may cause abortions.

Francis A. Gilardi, Jr. and Philip M. Gilardi, two brothers who own and control two companies that are involved in the processing, packaging, and transportation of fresh produce, filed suit against the Obama administration on behalf of their business, Freshway Foods, a nearly 25 year old family-owned fresh produce processor and packer, which serves 23 states and has 340 full-time employees.

Both companies are located in Sidney, Ohio, a city in west-central Ohio located about 40 miles north of Dayton. The owners, who are Catholic, contend that the HHS mandate requiring coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs – violates their religious beliefs.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — the second most influential bench in the land behind the Supreme Court — ruled in favor of the brothers. Requiring companies to cover their employees’ contraception, the court ruled, is unduly burdensome for business owners who oppose birth control and abortion on religious grounds.

“The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase; instead, it occurs when a company’s owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote on behalf of the court.

“They can either abide by the sacred tenets of their faith, pay a penalty of over $14 million, and cripple the companies they have spent a lifetime building, or they become complicit in a grave moral wrong,” Brown wrote.

The Obama administration said that the requirement is necessary to protect women’s health and abortion rights. The judges were unconvinced that forcing companies to violate their religious rights was appropriate.

Brown wrote that “it is clear the government has failed to demonstrate how such a right — whether described as noninterference, privacy, or autonomy — can extend to the compelled subsidization of a woman’s procreative practices.”

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Americans were warned about Obamacare -- despite vigorous efforts to suppress the warnings

Michelle Malkin

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is allergic to the truth. She is the ruthless enforcer of Obamacare's Jenga tower of lies upon lies upon lies. Now that this fatally flawed government edifice is collapsing, you can expect Sebelius to do what she has done her entire career: blame, bully and pile on more lies.

Three years ago, when insurers and other companies had the audacity to expose Obamacare's damage to their customers and workers, Sebelius brought out her brass knuckles. Remember? As I reported at the time, the White House coordinated a demonization campaign against Anthem Blue Cross in California for raising rates because of the new mandate's costs. Obama singled out the company in a "60 Minutes" interview, and Sebelius sent a nasty-gram demanding that Anthem "justify" its rate hikes to the federal government.

A private company trying to survive in the marketplace was forced to "explain" itself to federal bureaucrats and career politicians who have never run a business (successful or otherwise) in their lives. Sebelius went even further. She called on Anthem to provide public disclosure of how the rate increases would be spent -- a mandate that no other private companies must follow.

In an even more heavy-handed effort to suppress criticism, Sebelius wrote America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national association of health insurers, "calling on their members to stop using scare tactics and misinformation to falsely blame premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act." The threatening cease-and-desist letter commanded: "I urge you to inform your members that there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases. ... Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections."

The speech-stifling gag order declared war on every opponent of Obamacare who dared to question the administration's phony claims of cost-savings or expanded access. When McDonald's notified the feds that it might have to cancel health insurance plans for 30,000 workers because of Obamacare's effective prohibition on low-cost plans, Sebelius slammed The Wall Street Journal for reporting the story. She then rushed to issue McDonald's an Obamacare waiver, the first of thousands to quell criticism and bleeding.

Health care policy analyst Merrill Matthews points out that Sebelius cracked her whip against health insurer Humana even before the law had passed. When the insurer warned seniors that an Obamacare proposal to cut reimbursements could harm their Medicare Advantage benefits and coverage, Sebelius demanded that the company "suspend potentially misleading mailings to beneficiaries about health care and insurance reform."

The warning, of course, proved true. In September 2010, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care canceled MA policies covering 22,000 seniors precisely because of Obamacare rules on reimbursements and MA-style plans.

Sebelius' power-mad partner on Capitol Hill, Henry Waxman, targeted companies including Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon and ATT in a brass-knuckled effort to silence companies speaking out about the cost implications and financial burdens of Obamacare. After the firms reported write-downs related to the Obamacare mandate (disclosures that are required by law), Waxman scheduled an inquisition hearing to berate them publicly. After the Democrats' own congressional staff pointed out that the companies "acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards" in submitting filings that were required by law, Waxman called off the hounds.

It was a temporary reprieve. Caught with their pants down on the Obamacare website abomination and unable to stifle the cries of millions of Americans who are unable to keep the plans and doctors they like, Sebelius and her corrupt company are now blaming insurers, contractors and customers for the Obama administration's ideological mess. In short: They lied, but for your own good. Culture of Corruption 101.

SOURCE

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Federal officials seek to impose racial preferences on banks and financial sector under Dodd-Frank Act

At the National Review, Roger Clegg discusses the racial “diversity quotas” that may result from a proposed regulation under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which expanded federal control over banking.  That law contains racial diversity mandates drafted by Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a Castro-loving, left-wing ideologue who called the Los Angeles race riots that destroyed many Korean-owned shops an “uprising” against injustice. Waters once told a CEO in a Congressional hearing, “This liberal will be all about socializing . . . .uh, uh . . . would be about, basically, taking over and the government running all of your companies.”

As Clegg points out, the proposed racial “diversity” regulation is legally dubious, and even more burdensome to regulated businesses than one would have expected:

Today a number of Obama administration agencies with financial-sector regulatory responsibilities have jointly published in the Federal Register a proposed “Policy Statement Establishing Joint Standards for Assessing the Diversity Policies and Practices of Entities Regulated by the Agencies.”  The statement comes as a result of Section 342 of the Dodd-Frank legislation, which requires these agencies each to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion” that, in turn, is to develop diversity and inclusion standards for workplaces and contracting.

The proposed statement is even worse than the bill itself, since it aggressively applies not only to the agencies themselves but also to all those regulated by it, and repeatedly insists on the use of “metrics” and “percentage[s]” (i.e., numerical quotas) to ensure compliance. And while the statute at least cautions that diversity efforts are to be undertaken “in a manner consistent with the applicable law” . . . there is no such nod in the proposed statement, nor is there any mention of stopping or preventing discrimination – the only possible [constitutional] justification for consideration of race, ethnicity, and sex in hiring, promotion, and contracting.

As Clegg (who served as Associate Deputy Attorney General and Acting Assistant Attorney General) notes, the statutory provision that led to these proposed racial preferences was “criticized by the Wall Street Journal, four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Diana Furchtgott-Roth,” and other lawyers and economists. (The Dodd-Frank Act was passed along party lines by a Democratic Congress with President Obama’s backing.) Clegg wrote a “short summary of Section 342 here, and Christopher Byrnes wrote a much more comprehensive analysis of the statute, here. Comments on the proposed statement are due by Christmas Eve.”

Racial preferences don’t have to rise to the level of racial quotas to violate the Constitution; milder racial preferences can be illegal as well, as is illustrated by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod v. FCC (1998), which struck down the FCC’s attempt to pressure broadcasters to hire more minorities and women to promote “diversity.”  While the courts have countenanced the use of race to promote “diversity” in the college setting, they have often refused to allow the use of race to promote “diversity” in the employment setting (see court rulings such as Lutheran Church v. FCC, 141 F.3d 344 (D.C. Cir. 1998); Messer v. Meno, 130 F.3d 130 (5th Cir. 1997); and Taxman v. Board of Education of Piscataway, 91 F.3d 1547 (3rd Cir. 1996)). Similarly, the D.C. Circuit earlier declared unconstitutional the FCC’s use of gender in awarding broadcast licenses in order to promote “diversity,” in Lamprecht v. FCC, 958 F.2d 382 (D.C. Cir. 1992).

Since a desire for “diversity” is not sufficient reason to use race or gender in hiring, it is unconstitutional for this proposed Dodd-Frank regulation to require banks to use such “diversity . . . considerations in both employment and contracting,” including “hiring, recruiting, retention and promotion.”  Such a requirement runs afoul of the Constitution even when it does not require a bank to hire a specified percentage of minority employees.

While it is unclear how much this “diversity” requirement will actually increase minority representation, it is clear that from the length and complexity of the proposed rule that it will impose substantial compliance costs on banks (you can find the proposed regulation implementing the diversity requirement at this link).

The proposed rule also requires the use of racial “diversity” considerations in contracting. But contracts cost far more when they are awarded based on race, rather than to the lowest bidder. Even fairly mild racial preferences impose substantial costs on businesses and taxpayers.

For example, in the Domar Electric case, Los Angeles accepted a bid for almost $4 million to complete a contract rather than the lowest bid of approximately $3.3 million, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $650,000. The lowest bidder was rejected solely because it failed to engage in affirmative action in subcontracting. California’s Proposition 209 later limited this sort of racial favoritism by banning racial preferences in state government programs, saving taxpayers money. A number of state affirmative-action programs have since been struck down under Prop. 209, saving taxpayers millions of dollars. (I cite the Domar case because it involved an affirmative-action program that has been depicted by supporters as unobjectionable and unburdensome because it did not mandate racial quotas or fixed percentages. Racial quotas can lead to even larger disparities between the lowest bid and the bid accepted by the government, resulting in much higher costs to taxpayers).

I wrote earlier about how provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act violate equal protection guarantees and property rights at this link.

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Racial Preferences in Obamacare, and Discrimination, Too, Based on Weird Ideology

The Daily Caller has an interesting story about race-conscious provisions and racial preferences contained in Obamacare. It’s a subject that has received remarkably little attention, even though the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded back in 2009 that the healthcare bill was racially discriminatory, in two ways. First, the law is filled with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants” and give “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships.” Second, as an African-American member of the Commission noted, it ”creates separate and unequal operating standards for long-term care facilities that serve racial and ethnic minorities.” By granting HHS “the discretion to waive substantial penalties . . . for failing to report elder abuse and other crimes committed against residents of long-term care facilities that serve racial and ethnic minorities,” it ”could increase the probability that residents of such facilities won’t receive the same level of protection as residents of nursing homes that serve non-minority populations.”

As the Daily Caller notes, some of these racial preferences reflect a weird theory promoted by certain Obamacare architects: that the healthcare system should promote “racial concordance,” a fancy word for “pairing patients and doctors of the same race, a goal toward which the law channels taxpayer dollars.” The idea is that patients do better with doctors of the same race. But this motivation for using race conflicts with Supreme Court rulings, which reject such racial pairing as a reason for using race.

While the Supreme Court has allowed the government to use race in hiring or admissions for certain other reasons (to remedy the effects of the government’s own past discrimination, and, in the college setting, to promote diversity in admissions), it has rejected using race for reasons like this. In its decision in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986), the Supreme Court rejected using race to give minority students teachers of their own race. It observed that pairing people by race perpetuates, rather than dismantles, segregation: “Carried to its logical extreme, the idea that black students are better off with black teachers could lead to the very system the Court rejected in Brown v. Board of Education,” the Supreme Court noted. (Indeed, defenders of segregation had once defended having all-black and all-white schools precisely in order to provide role models for minority students.) Earlier, in its Bakke decision, the Supreme Court expressed skepticism about the value of providing minority physicians for minority patients, refusing to allow a state university to give minority applicants a racial preference in admissions to medical school in order to give minority patients access to physicians of the same race, and ruling that the university had “not carried its burden of demonstrating that it must prefer members of particular ethnic groups over all other individuals in order to promote better health care delivery to deprived citizens.”

The Daily Caller argues that “Obamacare seeks to segregate patients, doctors by race.” While this may be painting with too broad a brush, Obamacare does not seem to rely on the justifications for using race that have been blessed by the Supreme Court, like remedying the present effects of the federal government’s own past discrimination against minorities. This is fatal, because an improper motivation for using race taints an otherwise valid affirmative-action program, under Supreme Court decisions like Shaw v. Hunt. Even if the government had discriminated against minorities in the past, and the effects of that discrimination lingered today, that could only justify using race in minorities’ favor if remedying their effects was Obamacare’s “actual purpose” for using race, and its use of race cannot be justified if such a remedial rationale “did not actually precipitate the use of race.” (See Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U.S. 899, 908 n.4, 910 (1996)).

Regardless of Obamacare’s motive for using race, its racial preferences and discrimination are unconstitutional under existing precedent. Any federal discrimination against minorities in healthcare is either too isolated, or too far in the past, to support the use of racial preferences in the present. Even a history of discrimination against minorities by the government cannot justify the use of race now unless the discrimination is recent. (See, e.g., Brunet v. Columbus, 1 F.3d 390 (6th Cir. 1993) (discrimination that occurred 17 years ago does not support affirmative action today); Hammon v. Barry, 813 F.2d 412 (D.C. Cir. 1987).)

Moreover, to justify racial preferences, the discrimination against minorities must have been “intentional,” not merely “disparate impact” (“disparate impact” is a race-neutral practice that disproportionately weeds out minority applicants, like a standardized test that more blacks flunk than whites). See People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 538, 534 (7th Cir. 1997); Builders Association of Chicago v. County of Cook, 256 F.3d 642, 644 (7th Cir. 2001).

In 2009, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights criticized the racial preferences in the healthcare bill, saying that they were likely unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s 2000 Adarand decision, which subjected race-based affirmative action to “strict scrutiny” and barred federal racial preferences absent evidence that they are needed to remedy intentional past discrimination by the government. In cases like Rothe Development Corp. v. Department of Defense and the Western States Paving case, the courts have sometimes struck down federal affirmative-action plans sponsored by liberal lawmakers, citing the Supreme Court’s Adarand decision. ObamaCare goes even further in mandating the use of race than past affirmative action plans.

Racial preferences are not limited to Obamacare. Earlier, we wrote about unconstitutional requirements that banks and financial institutions use race in hiring and contracting, requirements contained in a recent proposed regulation to implement the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

Obamacare contains not only racial discrimination, but also other kinds of discrimination, such as massive marriage penalties that discriminate against married people. The healthcare law also contains huge work disincentives for some people. It has also reduced hiring and resulted in employers replacing full-time employees with part-time workers, driving even unions that once backed it to seek its repeal or replacement. It has also caused layoffs in the medical device industry.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Chicago way

A US politician is to serve more than two years in jail after lashing out on an elk head, guitars and a gold watch - with money earmarked for his campaign.  Former US Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr has been found guilty of spending almost $800,000 in campaign funds on himself during the 2008 presidential race.

Jackson, the son of civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, is in federal custody today as Inmate No. 32451-016 at the Butner Correctional Centre, North Carolina.  Federal prison guidelines indicate the former legislator with a fondness for luxury will be assigned a cell - possibly sharing a room with other convicts - and a menial job working for less than a dollar an hour. His fellow inmates include Wall Street fraudster Bernie Madoff.

Jackson's wife, Sandi, was given a yearlong sentence for filing false tax returns. In a concession to their two school-aged children, the judge allowed the Jacksons to stagger their sentences.

Jackson used campaign money to buy a $US43,350 gold-plated Rolex watch and $US9,587.64 on children's furniture, according to court papers filed in the case. His wife spent $US5,150 on fur capes and parkas, according to court documents.

Jackson represented his Chicago-area constituents in the House from 1995 until he resigned last November following months of speculation about his health and legal problems.

Jackson, 48, was once a rising star in the Democratic party and an early supporter of President Barack Obama, who served the Illinois state Senate and then represented the state in the US Senate.

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Feds Stage Pre-Dawn Raid for Potato Gun

Audrey Hudson’s husband had just left for work on August 6 when suddenly, her dog began barking. The nationally-known journalist walked over to the curtains and peeked outside to discover her Chesapeake Bay home was surrounded by law enforcement officers wearing full body armor.

The phone rang. It was her husband.  “I’m in the driveway,” he said. “The police are here. Open the door.”

And so began Hudson’s nightmare – held captive by armed agents of the U.S. Coast Guard, Maryland State Police and the Department of Homeland Security as they staged a pre-dawn raid in search of unregistered firearms and a “potato gun.”

But instead of taking the potato gun, agents seized unrelated government documents and notes from the former Washington Times journalist.

Agents took Hudson’s records during a search for guns and related items owned by her husband, a civilian Coast Guard employee. They also confiscated her legally registered firearms, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The armed agents held Hudson and her husband in the kitchen as they searched their home. At some point, one of the agents asked if she was the same person who had written a series of stories critical of the Federal Air Marshal program in the mid-2000s.

Hudson did indeed author those stories for The Washington Times.  “Those stories were embarrassing to the agency,” she told me.

It wasn’t until five weeks after the pre-dawn raid that Hudson realized agents had taken her private documents – documents that were not listed on the search warrant. At the time she was told that “miscellaneous documents” had been taken.

“I got a call from Homeland Security and they told me I could come pick up the documents,” she said. “The search warrant did not allow them to walk out with those documents. They clearly violated the search warrant.”

It appears the agents were on a fishing expedition. Hudson tells me her home is filled with boxes and boxes of files.

“But they only took five files – and all five had to do with the Federal Air Marshal stories,” she said.

The Coast Guard told The Associated Press its investigator was suspicious that the government documents in her possession were labeled “law enforcement sensitive.” However, they were returned after concluding Hudson had obtained them under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

But that doesn’t explain why the Coast Guard took her personal, handwritten notes. Nor does it explain why the Coast Guard accessed her personal Facebook page.

“I think they found a great way to get into my house and get a hold of my confidential notes and go through every other file in my office,” she said.

The Washington Times said Friday it is preparing legal action to fight what it called an unwarranted intrusion on the First Amendment.

“While we appreciate law enforcement’s right to investigate legitimate concerns, there is no reason for agents to use an unrelated gun case to seize the First Amendment protected materials of a reporter,” Times Editor John Solomon said.

The Coast Guard defended their actions. A spokesman said the warrant authorized police to search the family’s home for guns, ammunition, records of gun purchases, gun cleaning kits and other gun-related documents.

It should be noted that neither Hudson nor her husband have been arrested and no charges have been filed.  “We have absolutely no idea what this is all about,” Hudson told me.

I’ve got a pretty good idea. It’s about the federal government trying to intimidate an American journalist.

The Obama administration has a history of targeting journalists in their effort to root out leaks. The Associated Press noted that the raid on Hudson’s home came one month after Attorney General Eric Holder toughened the Justice Department’s rules for seizing reporters’ phone records, notes or emails using federal subpoenas or search warrants.

“This really can’t stand,” Hudson told me. “You cannot come into a journalist’s home under false pretenses with a bogus warrant and just waltz out with confidential files.”

So if you’re doing the constitutional math, I’d say the Obama administration has violated the Hudson family’s first, second and fourth amendment rights.

“Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that state police and federal officers would come into my house at 4:30 in the morning to take my files without a federal subpoena,” she said.

It’s really not all that surprising the Obama administration would use a potato gun to trample the constitutional rights of an American citizen.

It’s a perfect tool for shredding potatoes – and the U.S. Constitution.

SOURCE

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A quiz



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More on the Left/Right difference

I have been updating my big article on the history and psychology of conservatism and I present below my new introduction to it:

Left-leaning psychologists and other Leftist "thinkers" sometimes "study" conservatism -- usually with the obvious motive of proving a  theory which discredits conservatives in some way.  But the shallowness of their actual knowledge of conservatives is shown when they feel the need to consult dictionaries just to find out what conservatism is (e.g. Altemeyer and Wyeth).  That is a remarkably desperate recourse.  Dictionaries record usage but they cannot tell you whether the usage is right or wrong, shallow or profound. They even record mistaken usages.

The problem underlying the recourse to dictionaries is that the Leftist wouldn't know conservatism if he fell over it.  His only concept of conservatism is the caricature of it that circulates in his own little Leftist bubble.  But he does realize dimly that he doesn't know what it is. So with a schoolboy level of sophistication, he turns to his dictionary to find out what it is!

By contrast, in my studies of Leftism, I feel no need to rely on dictionaries.  From many years of reading Leftist writings, I can tell you what Leftism regularly is.  What the Leftist does or tries to do is to stop people doing what they want to do and make them do things that they don't want to do. They are not alone in that but that underlies all that they do and say.  What changes they want and why they want them I consider in detail elsewhere. So conservatives tend to allow the natural world to continue on its way while Leftists forge an inherently unstable world that can be held together only by coercion.  Leftism is quintessentially authoritarian.

The redirection of a large slice of people's spending power via compulsory taxation is only one part of the coercion. There are also many direct commands and prohibitions.  The very expensive "mandates" of Obamacare were under much discussion at the time of writing.  Only a Leftist would think that old ladies should be forced to pay for obstetric care.

It may be noted that some people with strongly-held religious views tend to be like Leftists in trying to forge an unnatural world. That helps to explain why Leftists are infinitely tolerant of  Muslim Jihadis and why the major churches tend to support the Left, some of them being very Leftist.  In the 2004 Australian Federal elections, the leaders of ALL the churches came out in favour of the (Leftist) Australian Labor Party.  The only exception was a small Exclusive Brethren group in Tasmania who supported the conservative coalition -- and their "intervention" sparked huge outrage in the media and elsewhere.  (The conservatives won that election in a landslide).

And in England it is sometimes now held that "C of E" stands for "Church of the Environment", because of the Church of England's strong committment to Greenie causes.  Cantuar Welby's scolding of business might also be noted. And a previous Cantuar (Carey, a generally decent man) called his little grandson "pollution" on Greenie grounds.  Pity the children! And, in stark contrast with the Bible, a senior  Anglican cleric has called "homophobia" a sin.  The C of E and most of its First World offshoots no longer have strong feelings about salvation but they have strong feelings about Green/Leftist causes.

Because they focus so much on personal feelings and the promise of salvation rather than on "the world", American evangelicals are something of an exception but, even there, 10 million evangelicals voted for Al Gore in the year 2000 American Federal elections.

But back to conservatism: While conservatives tend to let the natural world run its course, that is not a defining characteristic.

What Leftists find in their dictionaries is that conservatives are opposed to change.  That is indeed the prevailing Leftist conception of conservatives but it ignores one of the most salient facts about politics worldwide  -- that conservative governments are just as energetic in legislating as Leftists are.  Both sides busily make new laws all the time.  And the point of a new law is to change something.  The changes that Left and Right desire are different but both sides push for change.  On the Leftist's  understanding of conservatism, a conservative government that wins an election should do no more than yawn, shut up the legislature and go home until the next election!

So in a thoroughly anti-intellectual style, the Leftist ignores one of the most basic facts about politics. That sure is a weird little intellectual bubble that he lives in.  EVERY conservative that I know has got a whole list of things that he would like to see changed  -- usually reversals of Leftist changes.  But Leftist intellectuals  clearly just doesn't know any conservatives.  Conservatism is NOT a rejection of change, though it may be a rejection of Leftist change.

So what really is conservatism? I have taught both sociology and psychology at major Australian universities but when it comes to politics my psychologist's hat is firmly on. One can understand conservatism at various levels but to get consistency, you have to drop back to the psychological level. And at that level it is as plain as a pikestaff. Conservatives are cautious. And that is all you need to know to understand the whole of conservatism. 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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"Do it yourself" socialism

An illegal Chinese immigrant, bitter over his failure to achieve the American dream, repaid his cousin’s kindness by butchering the man’s wife and four young children, cops said Sunday. Mingdong Chen, 25, showed no remorse when he confessed to slaughtering the family that allowed him to live in their Brooklyn apartment and admitted that he committed the atrocity because he envied their way of life, a police source told The Post.

“The family had too much,” the source quoted Chen as saying. “He meant that the family had better income and a better lifestyle than him ..... He was jealous and just killed them.”

Chen was charged Monday but did not enter a plea.  NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks III said Chen had cited his inability to make it in America as his motive for the slayings, which apparently took place while the victim’s husband Yi Lin Zhuo was at work.

“Everyone here is doing better than me,” Banks quoted the suspect as saying during a confession in Mandarin Chinese, the only language Chen speaks.

Sources said Chen, who came here illegally from China and worked as a cook, used a butcher knife to slash and stab Li in the face — lopping off several of her fingers when she tried desperately to protect herself.

Cops found Li, 37, in the kitchen with her son Kevin Zhuo, 5. Both were alive but died a short time later at hospitals. The other children — William Zhuo, 1, Amy Zhuo, 7, and Linda Zhuo, 9 — were found slain in a rear bedroom.

Two of the kids, including the baby, had been decapitated, and there was a trail of blood throughout the house, sources said.
“It’s just a scene you’ll never forget, I’ll just leave it at that,” Banks said.

A distraught cousin of the dead mom recalled having met Chen when he lived with the victims’ family in the past and said Chen had worked as a cook but couldn’t hold down a job.

“He’s lazy. He doesn’t work too hard,” Gao Yun, 29, said after stumbling upon the crime scene Sunday and breaking down in sobs when cops told her what had happened.

Yun said Chen most recently was working at a restaurant in another state but had been fired about two weeks ago.

Chen has no known history of mental illness and no arrest record in New York City, Banks said, adding that cops were checking to see whether he has ever been busted elsewhere in the country.

SOURCE

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Florida Woman's Insurance Rate Increases 10X Under Obamacare

"For many, their introduction to the Affordable Care Act has been negative: A broken website, and now cancellation notices from insurance companies, followed by sticker shock over higher prices for the new plans," says a CBS reporter. "It's directly at odds from repeated assurances from the president."

Obama is quoted as saying, "If you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you."

"But people across the country are finding out they're losing their existing insurance plans under Obamacare," says the reporter. "In Florida, at least 300,000 people are losing coverage."

"When I got this bill, I was outraged," CBS quotes a 56-year-old Florida resident who got dropped from her health care plan.

Her new plan will be 10 times higher than what she's paying now, jumping from $54 a month to $591.

"What I have right now is what I'm happy with, and I just want to know why I can't keep what I have," says the woman. "Why do I have to be forced into something else?"

SOURCE

Why?  Because lots of do-gooder Americans voted for a nonentity  on the basis of his skin-color

Another unwelcome letter below:



SOURCE

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Obama Knew Promise You Could Keep Your Insurance Was A Lie

"If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period." (Pause for applause.) "No one will take it away. No matter what." - President Barack Obama

That was one of President Obama's signature promises that he made when selling his health reform plan. Critics said it was unlikely to be true at the time. Americans are now seeing plainly that it was not true. And now, NBC News reports, the Obama Administration knew this was a lie based on how the Obamacare regulations were written and revised.

The Obama Administration changed a "grandfathering" provision that would have allowed most Americans to keep their insurance and, as a result, estimated that 40% to 67% of all members of the individual health insurance market would lose their plans.

The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

It was hard to believe that the Obama Administration believed their own rhetoric about "keeping your health insurance plan" under Obamacare, and we now know that they didn't believe it either. But President Obama kept on making that same promise to Americans, over and over, even as recently as in last year's debates with his rival Mitt Romney.

The reason that insurance plans are getting canceled and new plans are more expensive is due to the Obama Administration's new minimum guidelines for what insurance must cover. Their rhetoric is that the new insurance is better.

Tell that to Jacqueline Proctor, the 60-year-old Californian whose new insurance must cover childcare and maternity care. Her insurance will cost "more than twice as much" as her old insurance and is mandated that she purchase insurance for services that she will never use.

SOURCE

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I Lost My Health Insurance Because Of Obamacare

Originally, my health insurance provider told me that my plan wasn't going to be canceled. The agent just said it wouldn't qualify under Obamacare and so, I'd have to pay a tax to keep it. That tax is a bit more substantial than you may have heard. If you don't have health insurance that meets the standards of Obamacare or isn't covered at all, the tax isn't just $95 next year; it's $95 or 1% of your income -- whichever is higher. Of course, that's just what it costs on year one. By 2016, the tax will be $695 per person or 2.5% of your income, whichever is higher.

Incidentally, that breaks another famous promise that Barack Obama made when he was originally running for office. Back then, he said, "I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

It's also worth noting that tax wouldn't be what I would pay for refusing to buy insurance; that's the tax I would pay to continue being insured under a plan that doesn't meet the standards of the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately, I didn't even have that option. A few days ago, I received a robo-call from my health insurance provider telling me there are going to be changes to my health care plan beginning at the start of the year because of the Affordable Care Act. After calling in, I found that the "change" is that my plan is being cancelled.

It's difficult to blame my insurance company for that. After all, it's hard for a service to be viable when the government forces consumers who buy it to pay a massive new tax for the privilege.

So, since my old plan is going away, I asked what the cheapest comparable plan that meets the standards of the Affordable Care Act will be. As you might suspect, there is a substantial price increase involved.

Currently, I pay $191 per month. That will go up to $274. That's nearly $1000 a year more for a service that I already have. In addition, the deductible on my current plan is $200 and that will be going up to $6000.

That breaks yet another famous promise that Barack Obama made, "I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year."

Setting aside the fact that it's projected that more than 30 million Americans won't be covered under Obamacare, most Americans will be paying more. Insurance premiums are going up under Obamacare in 45 out of 50 states. As bad as that sounds, I still feel fortunate after some of the stories that have been in the news. When you hear about people who are going to be paying an extra $6000 a year out of $47,000 in income or people whose rates are going up tenfold from $54 a month to $591, it's hard to complain.

Yet and still, the high prices people are being asked to pay today are just the beginning. The massive new bureaucracy, reams of red tape, and reduced competition caused by Obamacare are going to cause insurance costs to soar into the stratosphere over the next few years. In return for unnecessarily throwing away more of our income on health insurance, we'll face doctor shortages, a reduced quality of care, and death panels arbitrarily cutting off and delaying effective treatments to save the government money. Meanwhile, the government workers implementing the plan don't have Obamacare while Congress and its aides are illegally getting a 75% subsidy that the rest of us are being forced to pay for on top of the higher costs created by the law.

Tens of millions of Americans are losing their insurance, paying more out of pocket, and being forced to buy plans they never wanted in the first place by people who are exempt from the law they're forcing on the public. The law couldn't pass today and had Obama told the truth instead of lying shamelessly, even Democrats would have never voted for this law in the first place. A law built on lies that hurts tens of millions of Americans just to further Barack Obama's political goals is immoral, unjust, and should not be allowed to stand.

SOURCE

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Fact Check: Sebelius is Lying About Obamacare

Sebelius? Being untruthful about Obamacare? Perish the thought. Alas:

"Misstating the health care law she is responsible for administering, Kathleen Sebelius has asserted that the law required health insurance sign-ups to start Oct. 1, whether the system was ready or not. In fact, the decision when to launch the sign-up website was hers. The troubled debut of the government's health insurance enrollment website has raised questions about whether its start date should have been delayed to allow testing and repairs before it went live. Asked last week whether that might have been the wiser course, Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, said that wasn't possible because the law required an Oct. 1 launch."

To deflect criticism about the law's woeful roll-out, Kathy's both blaming Republicans and pretending that October 1 was a locked-in, legally-mandated deadline. My hands were tied, she protests. But who did the tying?

"In a visit to a community health center in Austin, Texas, on Friday, Sebelius acknowledged more testing would have been preferable. "In an ideal world there would have been a lot more testing, but we did not have the luxury of that and the law said the go-time was Oct. 1," she said. But the law imposed no legal requirement to open the website Oct 1. The law says only that the enrollment period shall be "as determined by the secretary." The launch date was set not in the law, but in regulations her department had issued. Agencies routinely allow themselves flexibility on self-imposed deadlines. Officials could have postponed open enrollment by a month, or they could have phased in access to the website."

Administration officials could have delayed this portion of the law, but that might have looked like a cave to Republicans, so that option was scratched off the list. Instead, they decided to cross their fingers, close their eyes, make a wish, and hope for the best. The best...hasn't panned out. (Remember, they've known this thing was on track to flop for months; as recently as very late September, a trial run of healthcare.gov went down in flames). What's ironic about Sebelius' erroneous comment is that her boss has displayed scant hesitancy in unilaterally delaying other portions of the law that actually are set in stone. In this case, the administration genuinely had some legal discretion to play with, but chose not to exercise it. Sebelius either doesn't realize this (head-spinning incompetence), or she's actively lying to cover her own ass. Neither infraction is worthy of firing, it would seem -- "full confidence," and all that. No, that level of accountability is reserved for the little people.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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So When did the Cuban Missile Crisis become Kennedy’s “Victory?”

That Khrushchev swept the floor with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, for instance, represented opposite poles of the Republican establishment of their time.... but:

"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”

"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” complained Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard."

Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment.

"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal.

"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of same.

"We've been had!" yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba.

"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Alexander Haig. "The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas."

William Buckley's National Review devoted several issues to exposing and denouncing Kennedy's appeasement. The magazine's popular "The Third World War" column by James Burnham roundly condemned Kennedy's Missile Crisis solution as "America's Defeat."

Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: "This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in the movie Thirteen Days. "The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy's team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time."

But not for the Soviets. "We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."

In fact Khrushchev prepared to yank the missiles before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What!” Khrushchev gasped on Oct. 28th 1962, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? “But that is insane!...Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” commanded the Soviet premier.

So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot forcing the Russians’ retreat. In fact, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach.

Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (five thousand nuclear warheads for us, three hundred for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy.

The genuine threat came --not from Moscow—but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, November 1962.)

“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”

Castro's regime's was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.

JFK's Missile Crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

Kennedy's deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you'll read about it in the mainstream media and all you'll learn about it from Kennedy’s court scribes, who scribbled Kennedy’s Missile-Crisis “victory.” To get an idea of the odds faced by those betrayed Cuban rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of "Scarface."

SOURCE

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The Folly of Resentment

by Theodore Dalrymple

There is one group of people whom it is morally permissible to hate, and of whom in these times of speech codes it is allowed or even obligatory to speak hatefully: namely, the rich. This is rather odd when one thinks of it, for economic resentment was ultimately responsible for more deaths in the last century than racial hatred. Yet to be a racist is to put yourself outside the pale of decent society; to be an economic egalitarian is to establish your generosity of spirit and profound sense of justice.

Perhaps this is because this world’s rewards are not distributed according to anyone’s idea of how they ought to be distributed; that is to say, in accordance with anyone’s individual scale of values. They seem rather to be bestowed capriciously and not in accordance with merit. Some, of course, have merely inherited their wealth; others have made it in ways of which we do not approve or even despise.

Not all rich people are well-behaved; indeed, they can be tactless, offensive, vulgar, and tasteless. When Mr. Ambani built his domestic skyscraper in Bombay I was appalled not by the expenditure (though I had walked through the slums of that city) but by the complete aesthetic worthlessness of what he built. To spend a billion dollars on a house and to detract, slightly, from the beauty of the world is, in a way, an achievement; but one of the functions of the rich is to preserve and increase such beauty. These days they don’t make a very good job of it; the rich these days seem often to have no better taste than the poor. One has only to consider the relative prices on the art market to understand that of all personal qualities, good taste is the rarest.

Still, hatred of the rich, which people do not hesitate to express as if it were a virtue to do so, rests fundamentally on two human connected emotions, both of them unattractive: envy and resentment. It also rests on the primitive notion of an economy as being a cake of a fixed size to be sliced up according to some plan, just or unjust as the case may be. On this view, a crumb in one man’s mouth is a crumb taken from another man. Poverty is the result, therefore, of wealth: which is true enough if you define poverty as being a certain percentage of the average or median income, as is all too often done. If you define poverty as the lack of subsistence or even physical ease, it is quite otherwise.

In France, President Hollande, who during his campaign said (as if it were a sign of decency) that he did not like the rich—the rich of course being those who had more money than him—imposed a 75% tax on people earning more than a million euro ($1.3 million) a year. Initially, the Constitutional Court rejected this tax because the constitution forbids confiscatory taxes (France has an unfortunate history in the matter of confiscation), but the president stuck to his so-called “principles,” or at least to his election promise, and taxed the companies that paid their employees more than one million euro a year.

This has enraged French football (soccer) teams, who pay many of their players more than one million euro a year. The football teams are therefore going on strike, for if they cannot pay their players more than that amount, the best of them will simply decamp to neighboring countries.

The regime of bread and circuses such as is now regnant in most Western countries is dangerously dependent for its stability on its circuses, and of all the circuses in Europe football is by far the most important. The Times of London, for example, devotes far more of its space to football than to foreign news, and no public figure would dare avow a lack of interest in football for fear of appearing to be an Enemy of the People. When I listen to conversations in the street, football rivals in importance difficulties in love affairs. A strike by football teams is therefore a serious matter; if it lasted or resulted in permanent damage to the standard football played, it could lead to social unrest.

I would be dishonest if I did not admit that I find the amounts of money paid to sportsmen grotesque; but their incomes, I am afraid, are a reflection of the importance millions of my fellow citizens accord to sports. To object to their high incomes is therefore to object to the taste of the masses, of which their high incomes are merely a reflection. Personally I would much rather the masses had a taste for my books and articles.

To judge by the commentary on French websites (which seems to be in concert with opinion polls), the French public is very much in favor of high taxes on footballers, whose incomes they very much resent even while it is their own interest in, even obsession with, football that drives up those incomes.

(We think of the French as a nation of Left Bank intellectuals, but the daily sporting paper, L’Équipe [The Team], has a circulation larger than nearly any national daily newspaper, and one that is holding steady, unlike that of the other newspapers.)

Why do the French—80% of them, according to some polls—want the footballers to be more highly taxed? Here is a fairly typical, though slightly more articulate than average, comment: Si, si il faut tenir sur les 75% et aider les nécessiteux avec l’argent des vaniteux et des footeux. (Yes, yes we must hold to the 75% [tax] and help the needy with the money of the puffed-up and of the football players.)

The effect of resentment on the ratiocination of a perfectly intelligent man is here evident. First he assumes that an economy is a cake whose proceeds can be redistributed without any effect whatever upon the size of the cake to be redistributed; and second he supposes that a euro taken by the state from the pocket of a footballer goes straight into the pocket, without any deduction by a greedy or inefficient state, of the needy (that is to say, in a country such as France, those who would like a larger flat-screened TV than they already have, or the latest iPhone).

The 75% tax appeals to similar low emotions as racism: I am poor because they are taking from me something that I deserve to have. It used to be said that anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools, but socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Doubles Premiums for Young Women

Because it’s not really about Sandra Fluke’s birth control. It’s about funding another expansion of the welfare state. It’s a tax hike looped through private companies. It’s wealth redistribution through the back door with a government mandate.

The vast majority of the population will be screwed by ObamaCare. A small number of people with medical problems who have jobs will benefit, but it would have been far easier and cheaper to pay to cover them. This is still about the Government Class and its insatiable welfare lust.

War on Women? The young women targeted for this in ads don’t benefit from it.

Healthy young women will see their premiums rise by an average of almost 200 percent under Obamacare, with increases occurring in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a new study.

Earlier this month, the American Action Forum released an analysis that found the average 30-year-old male nonsmoker would see his premiums rise 260 percent.

Using the same metrics, the organization found that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be just as harsh on women trying to purchase bronze level plans, the cheapest insurance available in the marketplace.

Overall, states averaged a 193 percent increase in premiums for 30-year-old female nonsmokers.

For example, a woman earning $31,597.50 would receive a 23 percent subsidy, totaling $653. However, her yearly premium would still be $2,186, compared to the $218.47 penalty she would incur in 2014 for not having insurance.

Welcome to ObamaCare. You’re doing your part to subsidize an unsustainable welfare state.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Kids Aren't All Right

Younger Americans are being suffocated by spending, subsidies, and debt

A word of caution for kids heading off to college this year: Your degree may be worth less and cost more than you think. Your job prospects will likely be grim, whether or not you get that sheepskin. Oh, and you're on the hook for trillions in federal debt racked up by your parents and grandparents.

Washington has willfully ignored the looming crisis of entitlement spending, knowingly consigning young Americans to a future of crushing debt, persistent underemployment, and burdensome regulation. Politicians on both sides of the aisle share the blame.

This summer, Congress made a big bipartisan show of cutting student loan rates to 3.4 percent from an already artificially low 6.8 percent. But even that seemingly helpful gesture will wind up hurting the Americans it claims to help. Federal student aid, whether in the form of grants or loans, is the main factor behind the runaway cost of higher education. Subsidies raise prices, leading to higher subsidies, which raise prices even more. This higher education bubble, like the housing bubble before it, will eventually pop. Meanwhile, large numbers of students will graduate with more debt than they would have in an unsubsidized market.

And when those new, debt-laden graduates head out into the labor market with their overpriced diplomas, they may not be able to find a job. According to data provided to me by my Mercatus Center colleague, former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Keith Hall, fewer than half of Americans today between the ages of 18 and 25 are employed. For those in that cohort actively on the job market, the unemployment rate is 16 percent, versus 6 percent for job-seekers aged 25 and above.

These young folks are also more likely to be long-term unemployed: While accounting for just 14 percent of the labor force, they make up 19 percent of the long-term unemployed, defined by the BLS as 27 weeks or longer.

The lucky few young'uns with jobs of some kind also suffer from rampant underemployment. In a recent blog post, Diana Carew of the Progressive Policy Institute wrote: "In July 2013, just 36 percent of Americans age 16-24 not enrolled in school worked full-time, 10 percent less than in July 2007." In other words, of these 17 million young Americans, 5.6 million were working part-time, 3.2 million were unemployed, and 8.4 million were out of the labor force altogether.

This jobs crisis will have long-term consequences for young Americans. A forthcoming paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics on Canadian college graduates by the economists Philip Oreopoulos, Till Von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz shows that in economies like ours, during normal times, the average person sees 70 percent of career wage growth in the first 10 years on the job. That is terrible news for people who are unemployed or underemployed at the start of their careers. The study also shows that those unlucky enough to graduate during a recession will suffer a 9 percent pay hit from the start of their careers-and it will likely take them a decade to climb out of that hole.

Weak economies always hit younger people hard, but this weak recovery is taking a particularly heavy toll, despite the massive government intervention in the form of stimulus and job programs. In fact, much of the uncertainty that gets in the way of employers hiring new full-time workers can be traced to government policies.

Take the president's health care law. Because ObamaCare requires employers with more than 50 workers to provide health insurance to all employees or pay a $2,000 penalty per worker, the law will likely increase the cost of current and future employees (those working at least 30 hours per week). There is increasing evidence that the new rules are leading employers to hire more part-time workers and/or to cap their workers' time at 30 hours, especially in the retail and fast-food industries. Outfits ranging from Walmart and Forever 21 to Virginia community colleges have already started increasing their share of part-time employees.

Health insurance premiums are also going up, thanks to ObamaCare's requirement that health insurers accept everyone who applies, that they never charge more based on preexisting medical conditions, and start paying for many medical conditions that previously went uncovered.

But not everyone is equally affected by the increase in premiums. In fact, while some Americans-mostly older and sicker-will benefit from lower rates, others (mostly younger and healthier) will see their rates go up significantly, even after accounting for federal subsidies. A 2013 study by Society of Actuaries fellows Kurt Giesa and Chris Carlson in the latest issue of Contingencies, the American Academy of Actuaries' bimonthly magazine, shows that 80 percent of Americans in their 20s will face higher costs under the law.

That fact is rather ironic: Since about two-thirds of the uninsured population is under the age of 40, this law, too, could end up hurting the very uninsured Americans it was supposed to help. As the Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy wrote of the study in a blog post at Forbes, because "premiums for younger, healthier individuals could increase by more than 40 percent," some will choose to pay the individual-mandate penalty rather than get coverage. In other words, they still won't be insured, the job market will still be constricted by ObamaCare, and they'll be poorer by the amount of the penalty.

Even if lawmakers repeal provisions in the new health care law, younger people will still not be out of the woods. That's because before Obama­Care, there was Medicare. And in addition, there is Social Security. Spending on these programs will explode in the near future, creating a massive pile-up of debt and unfunded liabilities. Medicare is the bigger ticking time bomb, with a projected shortfall of more than $30 trillion. Social Security's unfunded liabilities total about $7 trillion.

According to a Cato Institute report published this year by economist Jagadeesh Gokhale, making these two programs sustainable would require payroll taxes to be more than doubled immediately. Alternatively, the Cato report implies that Social Security and Medicare benefits would have to be cut immediately by more than 60 percent. In either case, ensuing payroll tax surpluses would have to be invested in securities that earn annual average real returns of about 3.5 percent. These calculations imply that for each year that passes without such fiscal policy adjustments, the combined fiscal imbalance of these two programs would grow by about $2.4 trillion.

While the entitlement problem represents the largest and most visible example of how younger Americans will be penalized by government overreach, it is far from the only trouble spot. Take farm subsidies: Not only do they artificially jack up the price of food, they also increase the value of farm lands, making it harder for young farmers to buy or rent land. The same can be said of the mortgage interest deduction, which artificially increases the value of homes, making it harder for first-time buyers. Like student loan subsidies, the mortgage interest tax deduction gives people an incentive to get deeper into debt than they would have otherwise.

From poor public schools to the minimum wage, well-intentioned policies tend to backfire. In addition, we are about to embark on a massive transfer of wealth from younger to older Americans. It is today's youth who will take the brunt of punishment from Washington's decades of "helping" previous generations of Americans. It is today's youth who will most likely see their own federal benefits cut dramatically, their taxes increased, or some combination of the two. And it is today's youth who will find it harder to get a good job (let alone start a company), buy a home, support a family, or do many of the things that were long considered a near-certainty for college graduates.

SOURCE

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Census: 49% of Americans Get Gov’t Benefits; 82M in Households on Medicaid

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 49.2 percent of Americans received benefits from one or more government programs, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

In total, the Census Bureau estimated, 151,014,000 Americans out of a population then estimated to be 306,804,000 received benefits from one or more government programs during the last three months of 2011. Those 151,014,000 beneficiaries equaled 49.2 percent of the population.

This included 82,457,000 people--or 26.9 percent of the population--who lived in households in which one or more people received Medicaid benefits.

Also among the 151,014,000 who received benefits from one or more government programs during that period: 49,901,000 who collected Social Security; 49,073,000 who got food stamps; 46,440,000 on Medicare; 23,228,000 in the Women, Infants and Children program, 20,223,000 getting Supplemental Security Income;13,433,000 who lived in public or subsidized rental housing; 5,098,000 who got unemployment; 3,178,000 who got veterans' benefits; and 364,000 who got railroad retirement benefits.

SOURCE

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Michigan  store owner fights the feds

Store owner takes on federal government over $35,000

Imagine having federal officers come into your home or office, flash their badges, and they tell you they've seized a bank account holding $35,000 of your money.

That's exactly what a Fraser grocery store owner says happened to him in January. He said it happened without warning, no questions, no court hearing, and he was stunned.

"I said, what do you mean you took my account? How am I going to pay my supplier ... This is the capital we work with! She said, 'I don't care,'" Terry Dehko, owner of Schott's Market on 14 Mile Road, told Local 4.

What could have happened to trigger this seizure of property? Dehko's attorneys say the IRS used an anti-money laundering statute, triggered because the store made frequent deposits of less than $10,000. Federal law requires banks to report deposits of more than $10,000 to the IRS.

Dehko says his deposits had nothing to do with skirting IRS regulations. He says it's all about his insurance policy.

"Well, we can't keep $10,000 in cash in the store either because of our insurance," he said. In addition to insurance concerns, Dehko says it’s also store policy to not allow the cash to build up in the store to prevent a robbery.

Sandy Thomas helps her dad run the store. She says the policy of seizing money makes sense if the government has evidence of wrongdoing. However, her father has never been charged with any wrongdoing, and she says the government shouldn't be able to hold the money for so long without providing evidence of any wrongdoing.

Thomas says having that much money in the government's hands has made running their family business more difficult. "We have a business to run and it’s a struggle. It's embarrassing that some of the companies that we've had credit with have pulled our credit," she said.

Dehko hired an attorney soon after the seizure in January. He says he spend about $10,000 in legal fees. Currently, the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based non-profit, public-interest law firm, is representing Dehko. They have asked a judge to speed up this process, which has already taken 10 months. They are currently waiting for the judge's ruling.

The United States Attorney's Office in Detroit says the process is moving along as required by law, and it cannot comment further on pending litigation. The IRS referred any questions to the United States Attorney's Office.

Frequent shoppers who were buying groceries at Schott's said they were standing by their favorite local grocer. "I love the store, along with other people. It always has many people in here. The IRS is wrong!" said Debbie Koslowski, of Fraser.

"I think it’s terrible," said customer Mary Ann Kuechle, "How can you seize property without any proper paperwork?"

Given the expense of a long legal fight, Sandy Thomas says if the Institute for Justice hadn't stepped in, they probably would have made a business decision to give up the fight. She fears that's what happens to many people caught in similar situations, they can't afford to right, give up, and the government keeps the money.

Her father says he's standing up for a principle.  "I'm fighting for myself and fighting for all America!"

SOURCE

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BDS antidote may come from China

An apparent antidote to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is coming from a once unlikely source. Chinese magnate Li Ka-Shing, among Asia’s richest businessmen, recently donated $130 million to Israel’s Technion University, as part of a joint venture with Shantou University that will establish the Technion Guangdong Institute of Technology (TGIT).

The gift, one of the largest ever to an Israeli university, is indicative of a pervasive deepening in the connection between Israel and one of the world’s emerging powers, China. This is the first time a school from any other country has been invited to establish an entirely new academic college based in China.

In addition to the $130 million gift to Technion, for strengthening Technion’s home campus in Haifa, Guangdong Province will invest approximately $150 million to develop the new Technion Guangdong campus.....

“China wants to make the transition from being a manufacturing power to becoming innovators, and they believe that the Israeli innovative spirit can help them accomplish that goal,” Witte said.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Tyranny of Electronic Systems

Some eight years ago the media was excited that Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich had formed an alliance about reforming health care. In 2005 Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post about a joint appearance in gushing terms –

Clinton, asked about electronic medical records, deferred, again, to her friend. “Newt has a very dramatic way of saying this,” she said, “which is ‘Paper kills.’” Gingrich sent the praise right back at her, hailing Clinton’s legislation on medical records as a “major breakthrough” in Congress. “This is absolutely the case that Hillary is making,” he said.

Of course, they were not alone. President Bush had already embraced the idea in his State of the Union speech to Congress.

Later, President Obama built the HITECH Act into his 2009 stimulus package and appropriated some $20 billion to make it happen. All promised to get everyone’s complete medical records in digital form by 2014.

Man, this is going to be GREAT! A model of modern efficiency! Bipartisan support! Interoperable! WOWSA!

Now, of course there were the usual naysayers and Gloomy Gusses. I was one of them in this research and commentary I wrote for the Heartland Institute. Dr. Bruce Landes, who comments here frequently, was another. Dr. Scott Silverstein at Drexel University was also skeptical. And Dr. Deborah Peele was very concerned about patient privacy in a digital era.

Most of these concerns were not about whether digital technology is a good thing. Of course it is, or can be, a very good thing. But the track record of top-down, politically imposed solutions is abysmal. And when you add vast amounts of money to the mix, chaos is inevitable. Great Britain went through a similar, though more modest, exercise and recently concluded that the whole thing was a failure, but only after spending some $12 billion.

But we skeptics were not able to overcome the hordes of advocates who were eager to get their hands on a bit of the $20 billion.

Now the results of all this are coming to the fore. The Washington Post recently ran an op-ed piece by Dr. Dan Morhaim, who is also a Democrat member of Maryland’s House of Delegates. (One of the refreshing things about bipartisan ideas is that the opposition can also be bipartisan.) He writes –

These systems tend to be fantastically complex. One doesn’t have to be intimately familiar with, say, Hertz or Enterprise to rent a car online. But many electronic health record systems have pull-down screens listing each of the 68,000 possible diagnosis codes in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases and 87,000 possible procedure codes.

Or consider what happens when I write a prescription: Every potential drug interaction or side effect listed generates a warning prompt. Inevitably, recognizing that the warnings are generally inapplicable and take time to sort out, clinicians start to bypass the alerts. Sooner or later, ignoring one will lead to serious complications.

Dr. Morhaim concludes –

"Perhaps the most pernicious side effect is the erosion of the provider-patient relationship. When I first began working with electronic health records, I caught myself staring at the computer screen instead of engaging patients, who rightly felt ignored. Like many colleagues, I’ve reverted to the practice of talking with the patient and taking notes with pen and paper. After the evaluation is over and the patient has left, I type in the data. This takes much more time, but it is the only way to complete a proper history and exam."

The result is decreased productivity and frustrated providers — and a lack of meaningful data to manage patient care.

And The American Journal of Emergency Medicine published a study finding that ER physicians are now spending 43% of their time on data entry and only 28% on direct patient care.

So we have spent well over $20 billion (that was the appropriation for the first year alone), and are left with a system that reduces productivity, fails to provide “meaningful data,” and destroys the patient/physician relationship. From 2011 to 2012 there was a 21% reduction in the number of family physicians who had “meaningful use” of electronic medical records, according to the American Association of Family Physicians. Yet the mandate to use this system continues.

Boy, isn’t it great to have policies with bipartisan support?

Meanwhile, I don’t know about you, but I think it would be swell to have a simple wallet-sized card that listed my emergency contacts, personal physician, allergies, and current medications. But that isn’t grandiose enough for the Washington elite.

SOURCE

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This Is What a Health Insurance Death Spiral Looks Like

A handful of reports last night suggested that the Obama administration had moved to delay the health law’s individual mandate—the penalty the law imposes on those who are uninsured. That’s not quite right: Instead, the administration will align the 2014 penalty date, which had been February 15, with the end of Obamacare’s open enrollment period, March 31.

It had been possible to buy insurance between February 15 and March 31 next year and still pay a pro-rated uninsurance penalty—something the Obama administration only found out a few weeks ago when a tax prep firm let them know.

Delaying the individual mandate might seem like an obvious response to the ongoing failure of the federal exchange system. But it’s a rather drastic step. And, in isolation, a potentially problematic one.

That’s because the premiums that health insurers calculated for the exchanges this year were determined based on the assumption that the penalty for remaining uninsured would be in effect, and would encourage people to buy into the market.

If you change the enrollment requirements—by, for example, ditching the mandate—while leaving the law’s preexisting condition rules in place, health plan participation will likely be lower. The result, as one insurance official told NPR yesterday, is that insurers will want to change their premiums. And in this case, “change” means “raise.”

That’s where the real trouble starts. Insurers raising prices as a result of lower than anticipated enrollment is an early step toward an insurance death spiral, in which premiums spike and enrollment figures drop until the only participants who remain in the market are very people paying very high premiums. We know because we’ve seen it before—in New York, Washington, and handful of other states that enacted preexisting condition regulations similar to Obamacare’s but without an individual mandate.

New York state’s guaranteed issue and community rating rules—the two regulations that limit how insurers can charge based on health history and require them to sell policies to all comers—took effect in 1994. At the time, there were about 752,000 policyholders in the state’s individual market, or about 4.7 percent of the non-Medicare population. But by 2009, according to a Manhattan Institute report by Stephen Parente and Tarren Bragdon, the state’s individual market had practically disappeared, leaving just 34,000 participants, or about 0.2 percent of the non-elderly population. Individual insurance premiums, meanwhile, were among the highest in the nation—about $388 on average in 2007, compared with just $151 in California, another big Democratic-leaning state. In New York City, the annualized premium cost for individuals was more than $9,300 and more than $26,400 for a family.

The result, in other words, was a combination of sky-high premiums and far fewer insured individuals.

Around the same time that New York was overhauling its insurance market, Washington state was implementing a similar set of health plan rules. Insurers faced new regulations regarding plans sold to individuals with preexisting conditions, and the requirement that they sell to everyone. For a brief period, there was a coverage mandate, but that never went into effect. The state’s individual market deteriorated. One insurer raised premiums by 78 percent in a three year period. As premiums rose, relatively healthier people left the market, and insurers were left covering a lot of very sick, very expensive individuals. In the end, many insurers simply dropped out of the market rather than lose money. According to a report on the reforms commissioned by the insurance industry, there were 19 carriers in the individual market in 1993. By 1999, there were just two—and they weren’t taking new applicants.

The individual market was effectively killed off by the reforms.

A delay of just the individual mandate would likely put the federal exchange system—which facilitates the sale of guaranteed issue, community-rated plans—on the same track.

(The administration, it should be noted, has made it quite clear that it thinks the mandate is absolutely essential to the larger insurance scheme, arguing repeatedly in court that the law cannot function without it.)

Now, it’s true, as The Incidental Economist’s Adrianna McIntrye points out, that there are risk adjustment mechanisms built into the law designed to protect insurers who end up with too many sick individuals. But as a Health Affairs brief on the law’s risk adjustment provisions makes clear, those provisions are designed to make sure that no one plan gets stuck with too many sick individuals. Plans with fewer sick people pay into a fund that creates a backstop for plans with a greater than expected share of sick policyholders.  That helps mitigate individual plan risk. But it doesn’t really solve the problem if the entire pool, across most all of the insurance plans, is smaller and sicker than expected. A death spiral that shifts some premium income around is still a death spiral.

The larger worry is that we may be on track for an insurance market meltdown no matter what happens with the individual mandate. If too few young and healthy people sign up for insurance through the exchanges, for whatever reason, insurers will have to adjust their prices eventually. The access problems in the exchanges exacerbate this risk by making it more frustrating to buy policies; as a result, only the most motivated people—which is to say, the sickest and most desirous of coverage—will end up buying coverage. The same goes for the high individual market premiums that many young adults will be faced with. A mandate delay would make the risk even higher. But it may be the case that Obamacare is heading toward a death spiral no matter what, and that if it remains in place, no plausible policy response will avoid it.

SOURCE

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Vulnerable Democrats: No, Seriously, Who's Up For an Obamacare Delay?

And they're not talking about the White House's two-bit non-delay delay either. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin's working on a bill that would delay Obamacare's individual mandate tax for a full year (bipartisanship!), while North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan wants the law's enrollment period extended by a few months. It's easy to understand the political instincts at play here: Obamacare is unpopular, the individual mandate tax is extremely unpopular, and the idea that the government might end up fining people for failing to enroll through the government's broken website is outright toxic. We've got to do something to at least buy ourselves some time, these Democrats are muttering to themselves, shell-shocked as the law for which they've taken major political risks implodes. Alas, as I've noted previously, these "solutions" are untenable. They're worse than that, actually; they're counter-productive. Do these Democrats -- who've voted to pass and protect this law repeatedly -- even understand how it works? It seems not. An education:

*  Delay the individual mandate. On top of the incredible political embarrassment that would come from delaying a provision the Obama administration spent years defending in federal court, policy-wise, this would only exacerbate the problem mentioned above. If Americans aren't penalized for failing to purchase insurance, the young and healthy ones will have even less incentive to buy it. Insurers, who agreed to take on individuals with pre-existing conditions in concert with an individual mandate, would no doubt have something to say about this. If Obama bypasses Congress to impose this delay, perhaps injured insurers could craft a legal challenge. Heck, they could even borrow the Obama administration’s own briefs about how inextricably linked the individual mandate is to the greater regulatory scheme of the law.

* Extend open enrollment. Though the White House has emphasized that the enrollment period extends until March 31, the penalty for not purchasing insurance would hit people after Feb. 15 — including those who purchase insurance after that date. So even if the enrollment period is extended past March 31, it may not pull in that many more customers because those who haven't purchased by that point would have to choose to pay premiums on top of the penalty. It's also important to keep in mind why the time to enroll is limited. It seems counterintuitive at first. Wouldn't insurers want individuals to be able to buy their product all year round? The problem is that if there were no such limitation, then healthy people — knowing insurers could never legally deny them coverage — could simply pay the fine and only purchase insurance if they became sick or injured. How do you think the car insurance business would work if people could sign up for coverage after they were involved in an accident? Obviously, there’s a difference when extending open enrollment in the first year of the program’s operation, but for this scheme to work, it’s also important to instill in younger Americans a sense of urgency to buying insurance by setting a hard deadline and sticking with it.

If Washington delays the mandate tax and/or extends open enrollment without passing parallel delays of other elements of the law like guaranteed issue and community rating, the so-called "insurance death spiral" threat only becomes more acute.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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