Everyone is talking about the approval of the healthcare reform bill and what it means for us (Read here and here). But where is the public option?
“High risk pools” will be created to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, which should address the problem of adverse selection.
It seems that health insurance companies seem to gain the most from this bill because the government is going to require everyone to have health insurance or pay a penalty, unless purchasing health insurance presents a financial hardship or if it goes against your relgious beliefs.
Meanwhile, the teabaggers are still their hateful selves.
LONDON — U.K. engineering company Smiths Group said Monday that it has agreed to buy Interconnect Devices Inc. from private equity firm Milestone Partners for $185 million. Smiths said the acquisition of Interconnect Devices, which makes probe technology for use in industrial and semiconductor testing, is expected to be immediately earnings accretive and will be funded primarily from internal resources payday loans. The deal is expected to complete in early April.
Many years ago a tall, good-looking guy named Evan Bayh, essentially then known as the son of former Indiana U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh, spoke to a group of Democrats and well-wishers in Frankfort, Ind. He was not running for any specific election then, but he was being groomed for big things.
More than anything, he sounded like the kind of fresh progressive, forward-leaning Democrat the party desperately needed in those early Reagan years. He talked about social issues and working men and women, not tax breaks for the wealthy or infusing religion in the classroom. His family was stylish and beautiful. Evan Bayh was the product of authoritative, enlightening dinner discussions in Washington D.C. He was ready. He was perfect, and Indiana soon embraced him for eight years in the governor’s mansion and two terms in the U.S. Senate.
That was then.
Now before I say more, you must appreciate Hoosiers’ nature. They do not like progressive ways of doing anything, unless perhaps it is a new way to grow more corn from the same earth. They do not like spending money, especially for things they do not yet have. They hate taxes, though those taxes pay for their roads, schools, bridges, and police. Unlike most states, for example, Indiana ratepayers do not have to pay utility companies for power plants not yet completed (I like that).
And, to the state’s credit, Hoosiers are all behind balancing the budget, and they always do. The state knows almost two years in advance when it might go broke and acts on that knowledge immediately. A few years ago a powerful tornado tore through southern Indiana, killing two dozen. The federal government took quick action to direct rebuilding, but the governor, a former bean counter in the Bush Administration, said thanks, but Hoosiers take care of Hoosiers. A check would be nice, though. He got one. Indiana is not Louisiana.
All that said, it’s a tragedy that a brilliant, charming, successful political leader such as Evan Bayh lost his balls. I have no better way to put it. There he was, sent to Washington D.C. to lead, negotiate, guide, assess, and take action on behalf of his proud country, particularly the Hoosiers who elected him, and he decided it is too hard and aggravating. Washington politics does not compose the friendly, patriotic activity it once did. Bayh gave up.
I was a Hoosier for more than 25 years. I voted for Bayh every time his name appeared on the ballot. I admit I also voted for Richard Lugar, a Republican. Frankly, two finer men could not represent any state. Either man could give three speeches during an election year and remain in office until he died. But has Lugar given up? Lugar is no more hard core Republican conservative than Bayh is hard core Democrat liberal, and he has more reason to be frustrated than Bayh. I cannot imagine Lugar giving up and going home.
What I am talking about here to some extent is a way of life in the Midwest, a sort of mantra out here in flyover country. We believe in that Protestant Work Ethic even though it means, for the most part, we’ll work hard for very little money. We show up on time and give it our all. We appreciate having jobs. We love building things, and we particularly value doing it fast and first. We take pride in just slugging it out on a job. It’s not perhaps the best example, but how many Big Ten teams remain in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament most years? That ethic rubs off everywhere. We do not quit.
But Evan Bayh quit. When the job got frustrating and difficult, he decided he would go home and find something else to do. Aren’t those the situations for which we send people to Washington? If the job were easy, we could send anybody. But we all try to elect men and women who can duke it out together and get the job done.
We know it is a tough job. Democracy is hard. We thought Evan Bayh had the stuff for it. We were wrong.
There’s just so much juicy stuff on Obamacare out there, I don’t know where to begin.
Let’s start by looking at that CBO report on Obamacare, and what Obamacare will actually cost. Kevin Glass at Townhall brings up some of the budgetary manipulations that were used in the CBO report to make Obamacare look better than it is:
I noted before the massive amounts of qualifiers that the Congressional Budget Office has attached to its scores of the health care bill at every stage of its evolution. This latest bill, however, rivals the greatest magic tricks that J.K. Rowling could come up with.
1. Double-counting Medicare cuts as both saving Medicare and spending on new programs
2. Counting revenue that must be used for future spending as deficit-reducing savings
3. Starting revenue provisions immediately while delaying spending provisions until 2014
4. Carefully writing the language so that the CBO can’t count the individual mandate in the cost of the bill (which they had done in the past)
5. Claiming that additional tax money raised will go to pay for spending in the bill when it must be used for other programs
Phillip Klein at the American Spectator also looks at the CBO gimmicks, and points out that part of the trick the Democrats are using is to implement the bulk of the spending past the end of the CBO’s 10-year window:
An initial reading of the report suggests that Democrats employed similar accounting gimmicks as in previous iterations of the health care bill, while making up a shortfall with more cuts to Medicare Advantage, siphoning money from the Student loan bill, and raising taxes further. While I’ll go into further detail later once I’ve had a chance to look at all of the moving parts, and analyze the actual bill itself, one thing worth highlighting is that as expected, Democrats have maintained the strategy of delaying the major spending provisions until 2014 to create the appearance that the bill is cheaper over the CBO’s ten year budget window, from 2010 through 2019. In this version, the bill spends $17 billion in the first four years, while the remaining $923 billion, or 98 percent, is spent in the next six years. I’ve illustrated this tactic in the chart below. One thing to note is that the oft-quoted $940 billion number only pertains to the cost of expanding coverage — which is the bulk of spending in the bill — but it does not include all other costs, such as the providing more Medicare prescription drug subsides, which costs about $38 billion. I’ve used the $940 billion figure in the chart below, but have specified that it’s only the cost of the coverage provisions.
The Left Coast Rebel points to a Weekly Standard report that the full cost of Obamacare will approach 2 trillion dollars. Legal Insurection also mentions the Weekly Standard article, and questions the credibility of the CBO.
The CBO is supposed to be a neutral calculator of legislation. And it is. I have no doubt that the people at the CBO do their best to calculate the cost of a bill, given the assumptions the CBO is required to follow.
And that is the catch. Whereas on less politicized legislation there may be reasonable assumptions built into a bill and requested by those seeking a cost estimate, as to the health care bills proposed by Democrats it has been all games.
Completely unrealistice assumptions have been foisted upon the CBO, and the CBO has been required to score the bill with phony math.
Jeffrey Anderson at The Weekly Standard has a devastating take-down of the CBO report on the cost of the latest Democratic incarnation of the health care bill, CBO: Obamacare Would Cost Over $2 Trillion:
For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs. First, it includes 2010 as the initial year. As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time. Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009. But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare. If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.There is more, much more. Read the full article.
The CBO report amounts to a fraud perpetrated not by the CBO, but by the Democrats who forced the CBO to play these games.
Michelle Malkin also addresses the CBO report:
The CBO didn’t release its non-report report because it was finished. The agency released it because Democrats needed cover for their bogus transparency pledge to post the bill 72 hours before voting for it (which they still didn’t fulfill). The good news is that the number-crunchers say they may have a real, final, useful analysis done by Sunday. The bad news is that the House Democrats – moving forward with their “deem-and-pass” trickery to – are scheduled to ram this monstrosity through by Sunday.
Chris Moran at American Thinker also slams the CBO report, as does Sister Toldjah.
And while we’re mentioning cost, Brian O’Connell at the American Spectator points to a Washington Examiner column that estimates and additional 16,500 IRS employees will be needed to enforce Obamacare. Or maybe that was part of the jobs bill?
Obamacare will likely have other negative impacts on the economy. NewsBusters reports that economic guru Jim Cramer claims that Obamacare will topple the stock market. Economist Larry Kudlow also predicts that Obamacare will depress the economy further.
Steve Foley at the Minority Report presents a list of costs, figures, and others impacts that Obamacare will have. The Political Inquirer revisits the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Jillian Bandes at Townhall refers to a Wall Street Journal column that predicts years of political and legal battles over Obamacare, should it pass.
There is also some more general commentary on Obamacare. Brian Faughnan at Red State points out that due to the buy-offs and special deals in Obamacare, Florida seniors will actually lose out on their benefits. Robin of Berkeley at American Thinker presents as narrative of how Obamacare indicates a lack of respect and caring for the indigent and elderly by pawning them off on he government. And Philip Klein at the American Spectator makes predictions on how Obamacare will fail:
To start with, Americans would still be facing skyrocketing premiums. There’s been a lot of debate over the Congressional Budget Office report on this matter, with Republicans emphasizing that premiums would be higher in the individual market, and Democrats touting the finding that in the employer-based market, they could be slightly lower. But the important thing to keep in mind is that these estimates are all relative to what people would otherwise be paying if we simply did nothing. So even if you look at the employer-based market, according to the CBO, a family policy would cost roughly $20,100 for the average employee in 2016 under the Senate bill, rather than $20,300 under the status quo. Good luck to any Democrat who attempts to tell those families and businesses struggling to pay $20,100 for insurance coverage that if it weren’t for Obamacare, they’d be paying $200 extra.
While Obama claims that we need to pass his bill to avert spiraling health care costs, the Chief Actuary for the Centers for Medicare Services, which is responsible for tracking this, estimated that if the Senate health care bill passed, spending would actually rise to 20.9 percent of GDP, compared to 20.8 percent under the status quo Obama has rightly deemed “unsustainable.” In other words, a decade from now, Americans would still be reading stories on the devastating effects of health care spending on our economy – a problem that Obamacare was supposed to cure.
While it’s true that Social Security and Medicare have remained popular even as the programs threaten to bankrupt the country, they are different from Obamacare because at least conceptually, everybody pays into them and everybody receives benefits. Yet Obamacare would be a welfare program in which one segment of the country receives benefits, while others have their coverage disrupted, and are punished with higher taxes, longer wait times, and poorer quality of care.
There’s a lot of stuff going on with this bill, and the Democrats in congress still seem eager to force it upon the American people. All that seems left is to sit and wait.
I have said it before and I will say it again, Congress is a rotten, stinking corpse. It is no wonder that it currently has the lowest approval rating of all time. This week more ridiculous legislation was introduced in that body that will only make our lives worst. The bipartisan bill that was introduced would punish any country that practices currency manipulation as an unfair trade subsidy. It would give President Obama the ability to impose retaliatory protectionist measures to level the playing field. Of course, the impetus for the legislation is China’s alleged undervaluing of its currency, the yuan, in order to support Chinese exports to other countries.
Now, it’s funny, how the legislation comes in an election year when there is a very strong anti-incumbent mood amongst the electorate. Many Americans who have lost their jobs in this depression are naturally fixated on statements from Washington dealing with job creation. So as not to disappoint, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer was quoted as saying, “”There is no bigger step that we can take to promote job creation here in the US than to confront Chinese currency manipulation.” This sounds logical on the surface, but upon closer analysis the senator as usual has it all wrong.
In the first place, to even threaten protectionist measures in such a fragile economic environment as we live in is dangerous. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was passed in 1930 and placed protective tariffs on thousands of imports coming into the United States from abroad. At the time, during the Great Depression, its purpose was to protect American jobs. Sound familiar? Instead, the tariff caused our trading partners to retaliate with tariffs of their own thereby exacerbating an already horrendous employment situation. What makes our politicians believe that China would not retaliate with protective measures of its own or worst yet cause the collapse of our currency by flooding the world markets with hundreds of billions of dollars it keeps in reserve?
But secondly, and much more importantly to our situation, we need inexpensive Chinese products otherwise our inflation rate would be through the roof and unemployment would be right there with it. Here is the vicious cycle of events that is American/Chinese trade relations. China’s products are cheaper because the cost of doing business there is less than in the U.S. Thus, we purchase Chinese goods with dollars and treasury notes. China holds these dollars and interest-bearing bonds in reserve and then prints yuan to pay off the Chinese suppliers of our purchases. When the smoke clears, we get cheap Chinese goods to buy, the Chinese manufacturer makes a profit, and the Chinese government acquires more units of the world’s reserve currency. Everybody wins, right?
If the Obama Administration ends this cycle by imposing protective tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the United States, not only will the Chinese government reciprocate with retaliatory measures of its own, the prices of goods in the U.S. will rise sharply. You see right now we export our inflation to China by way of treasury bonds and newly printed Federal Reserve notes. Without the ability to export our debt and a lot of the dollars the Federal Reserve has been printing, all of that liquidity will be spent in the U.S. instead on more expensive goods. As more money enters our economy prices in general will be bid up and will rise and given how much the Federal Reserve has inflated the money supply over the last few years prices will rise by a lot. At that point, Economics 101 tells us that high prices will squelch demand and huge increases in unemployment will result.
Since the 1970s, the politicians in Washington have placed us in this no win situation with regard to trading with China. They have destroyed our industrial base with unconstitutional mandates and regulations, and collective bargaining laws. They have spent us into oblivion by financing a welfare/warfare state unmatched in human history. If we impose protectionist measures against China we will incur inflation in the short run and high unemployment in the long run. If we continue to borrow from China to buy their inexpensive goods we put ourselves on an unsustainable course. At some point, if it isn’t happening already, China will stop financing our purchases and absorbing our inflation. They will sell their goods elsewhere and Americans will pay higher prices. Our standard of living will plummet and China will replace us as the world’s number one economic superpower.
But, Chuck Schumer and his colleagues on the Hill are oblivious to all of this. Of course, they also ignore the fact that the Federal Reserve is the biggest currency manipulator in the world. Ben Bernanke and his cabal of economic central planners better known as the Federal Open Market Committee fix interest rates and determine the supply of money. These actions directly determine the value of the dollar. Before Congress complains about China for not using market forces to value the yuan it should look in the mirror.
And that is really why I consider Congress a rotten, stinking corpse. Time and again its members grandstand for personal political gain and leave the American people with the mess. Its hypocrisy is appalling. Lastly, it seems like it is constantly coming up with cockamamie schemes to ruin our economy further. This latest scheme places the blame on China for our own financial incompetence.
From Keith Hennessey, Understanding The New Health Care Reconciliation Bill. A good site to get caught up.
Megan McArdle sounds dejected: First Thoughts On The CBO Score. Some interesting comments.
Paul Krugman back in 2006 at the NYT: The Health-Care Crisis And What To Do About It. Krugman offers his vision of what to do to contain rising costs due to vast inefficiencies, and what has caused the inefficiencies:
“First is the increasingly rapid unraveling of employer- based health insurance. Second is the plight of Medicaid, an increasingly crucial program that is under both fiscal and political attack. Third is the long-term problem of the federal government’s solvency, which is, as we’ll explain, largely a problem of health care costs.”
Of course, “free market ideology” and politics are getting in the way of what Krugman argues is the only effective solution: these separate problems need comprehensive reform, and the government is the only entity capable of delivering it.
Of course, we’ll still have poor people without much/any access, a need for rationing (never enough money, always too much need), waste, inefficient spending due to self-interest etc as well as what I think Krugman underestimates as the potential for simple corruption, government inefficiency, and the dangers of tying political interests to so much money and human need (the innovation that will be lost). He doesn’t spend much time discussing the downsides.
But, where is there a counter-vision by a fiscal conservative?
Lesson to Republicans: plan ahead. Clinton also had a pretty deep, statesman-like vision, and tried (Hilary) to get this rolling some time ago…so here we are.
Update: A reader sent this link to the Heritage Foundation. It’s a start. If you have other links, fell free to send them in.
Also On This Site: From Youtube Via Althouse-’Paul Ryan: Hiding Spending Doesn’t Reduce Spending’
The most knowledgable articles I’ve read that make the case for some government involvement are here:
Atul Gawande At The New Yorker: ‘The Cost Conundrum Persists’
Remember those hazy days at the beginning of March? It was obvious, innit: a hung parliament spells doom to the pound. Since then, the possibility of a hung parliament has remained just as strong (see Betfair)
and yet the Pound is up. From the $1.50 level to $1.54. Nothing spectacular: just enough to confirm my hunch that this is not “tories down, sell the pound’. The sort of dumb stuff that Tory newspapers were and are desperate to believe.
Although FT Alphaville have every reason to pick on him, it was not just Jim Rogers. Every saloon bar economist thinks that you can go from 1. not remembering what the UK produces (read Policy Exchange’s recent report on manufacturing) to 2. assuming the pound should fall.
Why is the pound up? Perhaps the unemployment figures – stronger economy, stronger finances, safer gilts (gilts are also up today). Perhaps the mildly hawkish BOE minutes. It is not likely to be eurozone strength: they have weaker prices than since the Euro was brought in. Nor inflation in the US, which is still kinda missing. Though if the UK is going to outgrow both these it might be good for the pound, it might just as easily translate into even more export weakness, more QE, and the other direction.
Unsurprisingly, though dismayingly for armchair political pundits determined to use their rules of thumb to dictate messages linking the Pound to Political Weakness, I think the direction of sterling is something to do with economics. I have no idea where it is going, but don’t think it will be much to do with the latest gossip about Liberal Conservative alliances, no matter how well informed.
and yet the Pound is up. From the $1.50 level to $1.54. Nothing spectacular: just enough to confirm my hunch that this is not “tories down, sell the pound’. The sort of dumb stuff that Tory newspapers were and are desperate to believe.