Kid arrested for building a clock??

Granted, but O certainly gets credit for stirring up police-hate.

Mostly agree, domestically. Apart from the sequester, and getting stuffed in the courts on his DACA immigration edict (yet to be resolved). And 60% of those mandated to buy Obamacare on the exchanges opting out.

Outside our borders he's been taken to the cleaners by just about everyone-- Russian reset, China, Iranian cash-'n-nukes, etc.

Cheers, James Arthur

He does, but some of that is hard to trace.

It's early days on O-Care. The theory isn't unsound. The devil's in the details.

The insurance law was so bad before that nearly anything will be an improvement. Say actual price competition is a start. O-care is just the apparachnik version of that. They'll tweak and tune for decades.

I don't agree.

The problem is that the Neocons had full sway with the old Provocative Weakness doctrine from 2003 to ... well, the present. That massively raises the noise floor.

The Russian reset is a continuing power vacuum; China was *going* that way, one way or the other... the Iran deal?

Treat the Iran deal like an over-under with one side benefit.

The over-under is - if it fails, we're back where we started ( with some money going to them - possible problem ) . If not, then there's progress - better to trade-trade than war-war.

And we may have a common enemy in ISIS.

The side benefit is that legend has it that Iranians like Americans as people. So if they get an economic boost from trade, this goes to hearts and minds. This is all blowback from - more Neocon activity - the 1953 "Deposement", so chances are it'll run it's course.

Don't get me wrong - I'd like the Neocon theories to hold up ( it would be much simpler that way ), but they all had sad endings.

I read his actions as standard community organizing, the goal of which is to excite resentments and discontent, to jar people into action. You can read Obama's thoughts on it in his books, I'm sure. Michelle speaks to it.

"Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual."

"Change" is the community organizer's staple word.

But on the facts, Obama's Justice Dept. continued the race narrative long after the thing was resolved, and used it as a pretext to take over Ferguson's government and police department. They continued the narrative, continued indictments and denouncements and accusations of bias, racism and wrong-doing, long after it was clear there was none. That's pure malice.

Statistically young black men are roughly 3% of the population, yet account for roughly half the murders. So it's not unexpected they'd have more and less friendly encounters with police.

Today I was personally glared at suspiciously, thrice, (by a police cruiser making passes to look me over) as I was walking. I'm a victim.

Odd. I think of him as the ultimate lightweight. But he cheats, which befuddles McConnell, and makes Boehner cry.

Cheers, James Arthur

The theory is unsound. If you sweep aside all the lies, Gruber wants to a) achieve full coverage by coercing b) people who pay, to pay more, to c) subsidize people who don't. Full stop.

Which Gruber admits in his videos. That doesn't cost less. Which Gruber also admits, in his videos.

The people who get it mostly free have already signed up. The people who were supposed to pay more to cover that, have opted out. Why? Because it's a lousy deal for them--the penalTax(tm) is loads cheaper.

The biggest problem was cost. If care cost half, nearly every other problem is either solved, or much smaller, more manageable. Obamacare does the opposite.

The cost problem arose over time from perverse incentives that Obamacare makes a lot worse. O/C ends any semblance of price-signalling between provider and consumer, substituting an undecipherable array of middle men and manipulations. It's a mess.

Forcing people to buy more over-priced insurance with more coverages simply doesn't make insurance cost less. It costs more, for the same reason a $1M life insurance policy costs more than a $100k policy.

There are other provisions Gruber hoped would save money. They're fat-headed, embarrassing. The website launch is fairly representative of the whole thing.

O-care destroys competition, doesn't create it. Three seals jumping for the same fish in one tiny pool just isn't the same as companies striving to supply what people need, and better and better.

I'll grant you, he is a hell of a politician. He really made people think he was something different. In the end he was like all the others, doing what he thought was best without regard of what the populous wants. I don't think he is any more evil than the rest of us, just better at getting what he wants.

I understand that. But he doesn't get that. The old "what the traffic will bear" comes into play. You can't get blood out of a turnip.

Sure - but over what span of time. In the near term it was a trainwreck anyway. They get the illusion of more market share.

I had a reference that showed this was a surprisingly small effect, but I've lost it. The population affected by that is like well under 1%.

It's not insignificant but it could have been worse.

What remains to be seen is the "Cadillac plan" tax.

I am sorry - I simply have to disagree there. It -in the aggregate - costs *less*, or rather the rate of increase has blunted.

As more people are covered, the actuaries get to use lowered risk factors for certain things. The uninsured are a considerable negative externality to the insurance industry.

There hasn't been price signalling since Truman ensconced BCBS into a tax dodge.

Sure. No doubt. But the economics of increasing the percent of population covered are pretty well established, and they work in favor of lowering overall cost per ... unit service delivered.

Price signalling doesn't necessarily work in medicine anyway. It's a craft good, the barrier to entry is very high.

Oh, indeed.

I wouldn't know. I did not see anything that I perceived to be directly inflammatory. Just conciliatory and the usual ... other stuff.

Michelle is just a figurehead. Also, the tradition there - the sort of rhetoric say, Malcolm X. used - is sort of strange, coded.

She kinda has to sound like that a bit, I think. Plus it's "Barack will..." which is sort of the family industry, isn't it?

It's an interesting... ecosystem. The domain of the community organizer is usually a ghost town, where industry usually used to be.

I'm not sure of that - the Ferguson thing kept boiling over.

Ferguson is first and foremost a failed city. Alex Tabbarok

there's lot of truth there.

I have no doubt it was intolerable, and even less doubt that once the cameras were rolling there were changes in behavior.

But that was a shift of focus. After there was no specific wrongdoing, then there must be general, background-level wrongdoing to talk about.

It's narrative. Not sure it's defensible and I'm not the guy to mount a defense anyway. It may just have been a convenient way to keep a story going he wanted to keep going.

I... can't blame him for that, to an extent. It's really a thing, and he elected to pump it a bit.

That's what politicians *do*. He's kind of waving the bloody shirt in a very mild way.

But I'm not sure what the downside risk is. Seems okay - for now.

This sounds worse than it is because even though the US murder rate is high, it's still unusual so a small part of a small part and all that.

But yes - young black men are at risk in more than one way.

No argument here. Those guys really do have to live with that pounding in their head, though.

In a way.

In others, not at all. Watch "The Abyss" on Frontline. Four moves ahead of Bohner et al at all times.

That's over a narrow "chess master" sort of bandwidth, but still. Very useful skill in that office.

Indeed. :) "There is no crying in baseball."

Of course they were.

joe

It's first and foremost a giant new federal welfare program with lots of new spending.

Secondarily, federal Grubers take over health care practice (because they're just so good at this). They turn medicine into tax-filing day, every day.

With that, they increase administration, record-keeping, and overhead demands. (Your doctor works for his ObamaTablet now, not you.)

Longer-term, they've taken a third- (insurance) and fourth-party (employer) payer problems, and added fifth (exchanges), sixth (IRS), and seventh parties (the ACA insurance company bailouts) in the food chain, and more (HHS, various panels) payers.

So, the Obamacare sub-person buying products/services now has no connection to the actual cost.

Obamacare fixes the higher cost of their higher-spec, less-efficient system (with extra dead-weight) by simply demanding that it cost less.

They're absolutely brazen idiots.

The effect is only small so far because Obamacare's actual requirements have only been applied to a small part of the country, the 5% of Americans who buy their own plans. The results have been so disastrous there that Obama has delayed / deferred / ignored most of his own law's requirements for employers, rather than face their ire.

But he does plan to phase those requirements in, after the next election.

Obama's also illegally paying insurers ~$175 billion (on top of Obamacare's legally-authorized payoffs) to keep their premiums artificially low. There's a lawsuit over that. So even the individual purchasers haven't seen the actual cost of the new scheme yet. There's another ~15% to go, on top of the ~35% increase so far.

"After all of this and two complete open enrollments, only 40% of those who are eligible for Obamacare have signed up--far below the proportion of the market insurers have historically needed to assure a sustainable risk pool."

That's actually a 40% tax on all employer-based insurance, non-deductible by the employer, phased in over time.

Everyone hates it, so there's a good chance it'll get repealed. I support it. Ditching it is dishonest. I think people need to feel Obamacare's 'love' to truly understand just how much Big Brother loves them.

Sorry, simply not true. Adding in people who don't pay, adding features, requirements, and lots of overhead costs a great deal more. Not less.

Not true, either in theory, or practice. Romneycare is a much-slimmer, much less intrusive, 70-odd page bill without Obamacare's grand takeovers. Still, Romneycare hiked MA premiums--then already some of the highest in the country--by double-digits in four of its first five years, DESPITE partly funding itself with hundreds of millions of Medicaid dollars passed under the table.

If you think some federal Grubers can run your health care better than you and your own doctor, you might want to hire them for your new website designs, too. ;-)

Cheers, James Arthur

Are you familiar with the aphorism "the government is an insurance company with an army."? This is a hack to paper over a previous hack that was a paper over of a previous hack brought about by President Truman.

I think I was 12 when my Dad and I ( who took my brother to the emergency room for the sixth time that summer - we were *ACTIVE*, baby ) had stitches. I saw the bill. This was in 1972, and I didn't know there was that much money in the world.

(S)he works for the insurance company now, not me.

Oh yeah. No doubt.

No, because eventually, it will be universal, and the sample size effects that give glad hearts to actuaries will emerge.

Yeah, but they knew they were gonna be winging it from the git-go. I can't argue with you on this point - it's been AMAZINGLY shoddily done.

Interesting. We'll see how that plays out.

Right.

:) I can certainly see that position.

IMO, insurance companies are defacto government entities now, modulo some of the odd ones like the Henry Kaiser plans.

It's like dressing the Mafia in chinos and polo shirts - they're still the Mafia...

That's the thing. They *do* pay, when you throw in any subsidies. Of course it all depends on where you measure. And there has to be a non-infinite rate of adoption.

I worry a lot less about direct subsidies to individuals than most people because it sloshes around funny.

I'm not that worried about that. It will take a while to slim that down, but it'll get done.

Sure. But this comes back to whether or not regional or national systems will have economies of scale.

Oh, I don't believe it for a second. I just figure it's electorally inevitable. I think this mainly because the number of people covered by corporate insurance is declining.

Methinks the real problem was the briefcase. See item #3. (Great minds think alike.) Electronic projects in briefcases are bad luck and always a problem. If he had used anything other than a briefcase for his clock, nothing would have happened.

Electronic bomb timer kit: Looks acceptable for a movie bomb timer. The twisty solid wires add a touch of movie reality.

That's a new one for me. "Insurance company" doesn't quite capture it.:) For one thing, an insurance company accumulates your premiums, and is legally, contractually required to pay your claims. The government doesn't, and isn't.

That's true, but previously you had a choice--you could change insurance companies, or pay cash if you wanted. Now you can re-dock to another generic Borg-port, selling the same gov-spec product at the same price.

The ObamaTablet is new. The electronic records mandates have the doctor's attention on data entry, rather than on you. That's pernicious. That's how they missed the Ebola case in Texas--the info was in the e-record, but in real life no one reads them.

I don't understand. Please explain how adding 10+% non-paying people (and a couple new layers of government) makes the *system* cheaper--more affordable for the people who pay for it--in your mind?

Yes, agreed. That's what they're now.

As someone with thousands of hours invested, all I see on a daily basis is an incredible explosion of mind-numbing regulations written in deliberately obscure prose.

They don't, it's the opposite. Barack can't know and adapt to local needs and conditions, and he never will. He'll never be able to jump on the innovative new lower-cost thing in real-time, and must always pay the inefficient Big Dogs more than enough to keep them afloat. So, Big Brother is permanently less efficient, not more.

Surprisingly, IIRC, employer-based insurance for full-timers has not fallen. Yet.

I thought it would, but--and I believe this is still true--enrollment changes thus far have been nominal. Of course, the King has deferred virtually all of the employer requirements so far, so they haven't had much reason to trim. Yet.

There are wide expectations that the Cadillac tax and the unAffordable Act's requirements form two jars of a vise that will, over time--and fairly quickly--force employers out of providing health care benefits altogether.

That's my view, too.

Cheers, James Arthur

:)

It kinda has to. And remember - they keep the printing presses, so...

Once you realize that all currency/specie no matter how substantial is nothing more than a convenient social fiction..

Maybe, although there were costs. And if you used the dominant, employer-based system, you really could not change.

O'care is as much an artifact of employer-based coverage breaking down* as anything else. Now, why they didn't simply use the Henry Kaiser model is beyond me.

You still can...

Oh yeah.

It's just deeply stupid. None of that is news. The records keeping in medicine has been onerous and excessive for decades. Some wonk-apparatchik-actuary at Global Casualty Limited wants this dataset, and...

Right. This being said, I have less heartburn with the data collection than other aspects, because strange people may find good things in the data later on.

If you can drive the cost down, it's harder to argue with. My objection above is based in cost.

Well.... they're logically not-non-paying. And as you can have them have a long-term relationship with a healthcare provider, the diagnostic cost and efficacy allegedly go down.

If they just show up at the E.R. it's very expensive.

We're dealing with people who strongly believe in aggregate measures, so they see a cost saving opportunity by adding a small subsidy.

I am sure I am messing this up, but my understanding is that this is the essential core logic of it.

I meant even prior to Obamacare. They exist only in their present form because of regulation. Nobody was able to speak for a national exchange. Y'know, an actual free market...

We do, and we don't. This is the tricky bit. All government finance is a trick of the light of present value calculations - deferring payment long enough effectively means you never actually pay.

This, of course assumes GDP growth, which is in short supply for poorly understood reasons.

I know, but the "us v. them" thing is a very real problem. because those are not hard and fast sets.

This is really critical to understand the whole thing.

Formalism destroys meaning, but it's required when you have to make precise decisions.

People in electronics do this all the time, but it's sufficiently circumscribed that nobody has a rash about it.

Well, maybe VW does now...

He doesn't have to do any such thing any more than Henry Wallace was required to understand the existing crop subsidy regime.

It'll emerge and evolve. "Regulation is treated as an outage by the economy and routed around."

I doubt it will.

Right. I'm somehow not surprised. It's simply of declining relevance to the Barackian narrative.

I consider the Barackian narrative *fully legitimate* in ways you appear not to, because that lets me understand things in a different way. It's probably just bad time management on my part :)

People really do think that way. Not because they're evil, but because that's what they conclude from what they have to work with.

Oh well. And at this point, I note that other wonks come along and spackle over cracks in the policy from previous wonks. The only thing that's less appetizing is software maintenance. But it's like that.

If you look carefully at the crop subsidy/"commodities" regime from Henry Wallace on, it's just spectacular. It's tied at the hip with what we now call SNAP, and I think "generic" stuff from the '80s.

I recall a conversation with my dairy-farmer uncle in the '60s that was straight out of Catch-22 about how he made more money not making milk than making milk. Somebody more adept with differential equations than I could probably model the whole thing.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22". "It's the best there is."

Yup. But we surprise ourselves.