Where Are My Keys?

Will Obamacare limit mobility?

This post raises an interesting point:

One of the goals of Obamacare which I agree with in principle is to separate employment from health insurance.  Tying them together creates all kinds of poor economic incentives.  But, the ACA law is littered with even worse economic incentives.  One of them is mobility.

Obamacare will cause people to freeze in geographic location.

Insurance companies cannot compete across state lines, so your policy is only portable within your state.  That’s bad for economic development.  A person now has to deal with 50 sets of rules, 50 exchanges.  Obamacare didn’t solve the problem.

There will be people that stay in place because of insurance costs from one state to the next.  I have looked, and personally for me my costs of insurance go up exponentially when I move out of state.

In our old broken healthcare system, employers would pick up the difference.  As our society transitions to an independent worker society, and insurance isn’t tied to job, individuals will be forced to pick up the cost.

Instead of opening up competition, Obamacare shuts it down.  One of the great facets of the United States is that each state competes with the other.   If one state passes bad laws, and restricts freedom, people can pick up and leave to go to another state.  If an industry shuts down, people can leave and pursue opportunity somewhere else.

Obamacare makes that highly difficult.

Cool new technology for basketball coaches..

Check this out:

But here's the wow part: The clear circles in the video are what the Toronto defenders should have done. Not tracking—analyzing. Predicting. Evaluating. It uses a combination of data analysis and scouting reports for the opposing players, and knowledge of the team's defensive scheme and personnel to spit out exactly how a play is supposed to look, if it's optimized and run correctly. The values for each decision are calculated based on the expected value of a play, which is calculated multiple times per second. So, what is the value of giving up a 3? How about of going under a screen while guarding a good jump shooter? The ghost players make the right decision every time. That's next level, robots-replacing-humans stuff.

The scarier part? It's not even running at optimal efficiency. The computer model still uses the basic Toronto scheme, instead of trying to just come up with some platonic ideal of NBA defense. That's because coaches still aren't sold on computers knowing best, so the data is being offered up in the friendliest version. Sometimes. In other situations they remain at odds, like with 3-pointers, where the data says even below average shooters should jack them up, while coach Dwane Casey has a heart attack every time a sub-par shooter fires a seemingly idiotic 3.

 

More liberal "logic" on display..

According to Bill Maher, it was okay for Obama to lie about keeping your coverage, because if he told the truth, the law wouldn't have passed:

 

And yet there are still voices on the Left that think Obamacare has nothing to do with cancellations..

It doesn't get any clearer than this, yet to some, it still won't matter.  They'll still claim Obamacare had nothing to do with Big Insurance sending out cancellation notices:

The cancellations come as a result of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which says that health insurance policies that fail to offer added benefits, such as prescription drug coverage and free preventive care, can’t be sold after this year even if they’re cheaper. With the online site expected to face difficulties through November, Americans may have only weeks to find replacement coverage, and many may end up paying higher premiums.

Something else that is getting lost in this initial shuffle is the employer-paid health plans.  The Administration is trying to downplay the effect of Obamacare cancellation notices, by reminding us that around 80% of people are covered by employer plans, or Government programs, and thus not affected by the mandate.  What they neglect to mention (and what I think will be the true tsunami of Obamacare) is when smaller to medium sized companies realize that it is cheaper to give their employees a stipend (like a car allowance, or cell phone allowance) to be used toward the employee buying their own coverage on the exchanges, than it is to pay for employer provided coverage.

If that happens before Obamacare gets a large pool of young, healthy kids to join up, then the death spiral is accelerated even more.  If you think folks are pissed now, just wait.

I think I have the new Leftie talking point down..

Old: "If you like your plan, you can keep it."

New: "Your old plan sucked, this one is better."

Kinda reminds me of how "Global Warming" became "Climate Change".  When the facts don't fit the narrative, change the narrative, and hope no one notices.

Chris Matthews(!) finally gets pissed about Benghazi..

The only reason he is asking these questions, is because of the 60 Minutes piece on Sunday.

 

Welcome to the party, Chrissy.

Wow.

 

Barack Obama, liar..

Not only is "If you like it, you can keep it" being proven false, we are also learning that the President knew millions would lose their existing coverage, and continued to mislead the American People.

We also learn that delaying the start date of Obamacare would have disasterous results on the insurance industry:

The proposal to extend the open enrollment period, which has been endorsed by 10 Democratic senators, is a reaction to the well-documented problems with HealthCare.gov in its opening month. With many people having trouble applying for insurance through the website, and the administration setting a Nov. 30 deadline for the site to be fully functional, the senators say people need more time to sign up for coverage. The enrollment period is scheduled to end March 31. The senators haven't asked for a specific new end date yet.

But expect to start hearing a significant amount of pushback from the industry, with a message focused on the fact that insurance premiums could skyrocket in 2015 if the enrollment period is extended.

"We are focused on educating lawmakers and the broader policy community about why the individual mandate and defined open enrollment periods are essential to achieving broad participation in the marketplaces," Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, a major industry lobbying group, told TPM. "Without these enrollment incentives, many young, healthy people may wait to purchase coverage until they need it, driving up premiums for everyone else."

The problem, according to the industry, is that an extended enrollment period could skew their calculations for 2015 premiums. Here's why.

Right now, insurers need to submit 2015 rates to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services between April 1 and April 30, 2014. If the enrollment period ends in March, as currently scheduled, insurers will know exactly what their customer base looks like as they make projections about their 2015 rates.

But if people can still sign up after March 31, either while or after insurers are making those calculations, it creates a few problems. Here's the big one: Most experts assume that young and healthy people -- who are crucial to making the law's finances work by offsetting the costs of sicker and older enrollees -- are more likely to wait till the last possible moment or until they get sick to sign up for insurance.

If that's true and they can't be accounted for when insurers are projecting their 2015 rates because of extended enrollment, that could lead to an older and sicker pool when those calculations for 2015 are being made. That would likely increase rates. And generally, the uncertainty about the pools could cause insurers to err on the side of caution.

"We think it's important for everyone to understand that the individual mandate is critical to making the insurance reforms work and to ensuring affordable coverage for consumers," the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association said in a statement to TPM ."Unless everyone is covered, the reforms included in this law fundamentally do not work. An extension of the open enrollment season is effectively a delay of the individual mandate, with the same serious consequences for consumers."

The Insurance Companies are following the rules (as written by Democrats).  While the President has been happy to change/break the rules on a whim (exemptions, etc.), if it is done this time around, it will have devastating results.

Way to go, Democrats!  Way to go by ram this piece of shit through the system using parliamentary tricks, way to go by not reading what was in it, and way to go by doing it with zero Republican support.

If the GOP finds a way to somehow screw up the golden ticket for the 2014 elections (full repeal, reminding people who is responsible for their loss in coverage, premium increases, etc.), then God help this Country.

Sure was a good thing that the MSM focused on Mitt Romney cutting another kid's hair in high school, how his dog once rode on top of a car, and that he had binders full of women during the last election cycle, wasn't it?

Random..

Deja vu, all over again..

Mark Steyn lets us in on a lttle secret:

The witness who coughed up the intriguing tidbit about Obamacare’s exemption from privacy protections was one Cheryl Campbell of something called CGI. This rang a vague bell with me. CGI is not a creative free spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian their name is French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s auditor general reported to parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.

Sound familiar?

Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.

Sound familiar?

So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.

Sound familiar?

Read the whole thing.