Miscellany: 10/12/13

Quote of the Day
Individually, we are one drop.
Together, we are an ocean.
Ryunosuke Satoro

Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day

The Oxymoronic "Affordable Care Act"
...
This excerpt is from the LA Business Journal:

The Anthem Blue Cross representative could not have been more helpful earlier this year in pointing me to a new health insurance plan, one which lowered the monthly premium for my family of five yet maintained an adequate level of coverage for us. Most importantly, the new higher-deductible plan saved us a couple of hundred dollars a month in premium costs....The [$666 monthly premium] plan, and every other Anthem policy available to individuals in California for that matter, did not meet federal requirements under the Affordable Care Act...The [ACA California exchange] bronze plan options, which feature the lowest premiums and highest deductibles, for example, were disappointing and hardly affordable. For starters, the bronze offerings included just three carriers, including two HMO providers and our current carrier, Anthem. I was stunned by the $900 monthly premium, not to mention higher out-of pocket costs.  Our doctor office co-payment would double from $30 under our current policy to $60 under the Obamacare policy, and in the event of a trip to an emergency room, our co-pay would triple from $100 to $300.  The new normal at our house could mean living without health insurance, which would result in penalties at tax time .We’ll stash a few bucks in a health savings account and pay as we go to the doctor. If, heaven forbid, my wife or I receive a cancer diagnosis, we’ll go straight to the exchange since carriers will be prohibited from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions. How’s that for a perverse incentive created by a flawed law? And the more we learn about the Affordable Care Act, the less affordable it becomes.

This comes from a (conservative blogger) Michelle Malkin reader:

I live in New Jersey, but work for a small company based out of Massachusetts. For years, we were all insured through the company from a plan that originated in Massachusetts. However, as soon as Obamacare was passed, we were "audited" by the insurance company, and it turns out only 50 percent of our company is based in Massachusetts, and therefore we did not qualify as a company under the law. Apparently, you need 51 percent based in the state. About five days prior to our insurance policy renewal, we were told we could not (renew).

On Oct. 1, I tried to get into the exchange for New Jersey that is run by the federal government. I earn too much for a subsidy, but I wanted to see what my options were and how much more this was going to cost.

I created an account and tried for four days to get in. Each time it said my password was invalid. I tried to use the "forgot password" option so they could send me a link to reset. When I got the link, the system kept saying that it didn't recognize my user account. When I tried to re-create the user account, it told me that one already existed. I called the number several times, and they all told me the same thing: Try back later. The glitches are being worked out.

I (then) created a new account under (my wife's) name. After several attempts, I was able to get in. Over the weekend, I spent at least four hours trying to fill out the application. Each time, the website crashed. When I got back to work on Monday, I tried one more time. Lo and behold, the application was submitted.

According to the government, I'm not eligible for any private plans. I received a notice that my entire family is only eligible for Medicaid! I make a decent salary. I'm not eligible for a subsidy, let alone Medicaid.

This morning my wife received a call. Apparently, it was the exchange. She explained to them that we are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. 

Horizon Blue Cross does offer a similar plan (to the one being canceled) for about the same, but the problem is that my children's pediatricians are not in it (so much for keeping your doctors). The only plans that the doctors take involve a 40 percent deductible with higher co-pays. So now I have fewer options and not more. There is another new company offering coverage where I am, but it has zero out-of-network benefits and a smaller network. Either way, everything is changing for me with higher costs.

Milton Friedman and other libertarian-conservatives, including yours truly, have discussed cash, charity, and catastrophic insurance. Here's a short discussion from AAPS, a more free-market physician group I've previously referenced and praised in the blog:



Finally, Cato Institute did one of its events to discuss an author's liherty-related book, in this case, David Goldhill's Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It. (Just a warning to readers: I'm embedding it here for reader convenience, but the video is over an hour long.) Goldhill is a businessman, ironically a lifelong Democrat, whom believes ObamaCare merely exacerbates the dysfunctional  health care sector over the last few decades. (So help me if I hear another government policy analyst try to argue that the healthcare industry is "special" and free market principles don't work or are irrelevant... We have creative accounting all over the place with "free" services and products, cross-group subsidies, government mandates requiring vendors to issue below-cost policies, etc We have the infamous hospital chargemaster, the mysterious price list, which notoriously lacks transparency. The bottom line is the Democrats have been been promoting all the freebies in the plan, but we know that providers and vendors aren't donating their time and materials for free. It all gets made up somehow, maybe, e.g., higher office visit rates, etc. But a key point Goldhill is making is that such an opaque system is intrinsically harder to manage from a business aspect. Michael Cannon, one of Cato's health guru analysts, is profoundly skeptical even of the idea of government-run catastrophic care, on a slippery-slope basis of governmental domestic empire-building (and where you draw the lines, e.g., needs-based eligibility). I'm somewhat empathetic to this point of view, although I worry about how we handle things like the availability of treatment for genetic disorders. where costs can be prohibitive and events are not really random. (Consider, for instance, things like sickle-cell anemia, breast cancer, diabetes, etc.)



Facebook Corner

Viz LFC

 If Society is God, then I'm an atheist.

Via LFC

 This reminds me of an incident in Houston. I was waiting for traffic to clear to make a right on Westheimer (a very busy street) from a side street bordering a strip mall. For some odd reason, some businessman was sitting in his car in the inbound lane to my left. He never looked in my direction the 2-3 minutes we were waiting for a break in traffic. As soon as there was a break, he clipped my lane--really drove into my left fender. We get out of our cars, his right front bumper is embedded in my fender, and the dirtbag asked if my left fender was crumpled before the accident (expletive deleted). His insurance company rejected the claim he initiated, based on a minor error I made in the report referencing the side street. My insurance company wouldn't get involved because the accident wasn't my fault. I eventually got the other insurance company to pay off, but I had to trick the other driver to admit in writing he hit my car. (He claimed he was in the outgoing lane and I had suddenly pulled up next to him straddling the curb, and he had no alternative but to hit my car.) 

My position on handling pre-existing conditions is if the government wants to subsidize premiums for high risk insured, they should do so directly, not essentially abuse regulation to impose a de facto tax on other plan participants. Guaranteed issue by regulation of private plans, i.e., forcing insurers to issue below-cost policies, is morally corrupt and legal plunder.

Via LFC

 Doesn't that cover just about all government spending?

Via LFC

Somehow the population of squirrels thrives without government intervention against nut hoarding... [Humorous note: I think the picture is of a chipmunk, not a squirrel; see the Onion piece below. I think the original post described it as a squirrel. But the general concept remains the same. The economist, of course, is Keynes. Keynesians believe that savings cuts consumption,  hurting the economy. More classical economists argue that lower prices in a downturn can trigger demand.]

via LFC

 Disagree.I do think the political process is morally corruptible and biases towards counterproductive activist/interventionist policy. As the Demagogue-in-Chief is fond of saying, "We can't afford to do nothing." The press and historians lionize activist policy and do a poor job discussing opportunity costs. I do think conservatives often don't see the inconsistency in supporting the Big Defense military-industrial complex, and too many trust the government on law-and-order issues in conflict with individual rights. But only one party has driven the positive rights agenda; the other side has to play defense against government scope creep.

Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Michael Ramirez and Townhall

Political Humor




You see the moral hazard of trusting the government to squirrel away real assets for their golden years instead of IOU's in past government spending sprees....

Musical Interlude: Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, "You Really Got a Hold on Me"