The Obamacare prediction of the week
I’ve got a new piece up at PJ. It’s about MIT economist Jonathan Gruber’s claim that only 3% of the population will be hurt financially by premium changes as a result of Obamacare, a statistic that’s currently being trumpeted by the left.
[NOTE: I just noticed this article by Megan McArdle that critiques a graph based on Gruber’s predictions.]
One should never pen an opinion piece shortly after putting down the bong.
3% is a trite estimate of the paperwork burden imposed by 0-care.
He’s daft.
In which American contexts is it “Fine, OK, even good” to abuse a minority, and in which contexts is it Bad?
We’re sure hearing from Jay Carney abd other Statists that cancellation of individual health insurance policies affects “only as small minority” of the insured.
IMO. so we get to the end of the rule of law.
Gruber on his model’s shortcomings: “given publicly available data we cannot incorporate the effects of the ban on pre-existing conditions exclusions.”
Which are going to be the nail in the coffin of the insurance companies. It’s like saying, “I’ve got a great model of the solar system, but it doesn’t take the sun into account.”
Like always, two explanations: fool or knave.
On Megan’s article, two points:
1) She’s right to criticize the 80% part of the graph in particular, as I’ve heard that a large percentage of people with employer-based coverage will be affected…as in, “dropped” next year. The “good” thing about that is companies are free to anticipate the law’s deadlines, and will start dropping people before then. That should give quite a bit more clarity to the 2014 elections.
2) As the data comes in, the Truth will become a moving target as the leftists keep changing their stories. We should nail them down now. Burn that graph into the public consciousness, make the libs own it. Then, ask them how much the numbers would have to change before they concede that the reality is different from the promises; and how much before this endeavor is no longer worth it.
Gruber is either dillusional or a crook.
The major premise that the ACA is based upon is bogus. Government solutions are always more costly and inefficient because of the disconnect of incentives and inability to force competitive continuous improvement. Just because captive health care “insurance” providers remain in the system to serve as the politicial whipping boys it will not change the outcome.
Costs will naturally go up since participants will still have virtually no incentive to make prudent choices based on economic trade-offs and shop for the best deals. Costs of service will remain largely obscured and disconnected from the consumer.
By design employers will pay penalties (a tax) rather than offer plans as an employee benefit forcing more people into the pool.
Soon health care professionals will be serfs of the bureaucracy and lose pride in their work and what little customer service orientation that remains in our already government program distorted health care industry.
From the Postal Service, the DMV, and the IRS to the Social Security Office every function suffers from substantial inefficiency and some form of waste, fraud and abuse. Reasoning people do not need a computer model to understand what the outcome will be as politicians double down with the ACA.
Whether delusional fool or crooked knave, had MIT any integrity, it would immediately fire him. Incompetence or intellectual dishonesty must be fireable transgressions in the academic sphere or the institution loses all claims to intellectual and moral integrity. That these clowns are not fired, explains why leftists like Gruber continue to infest our academia.
So only the people that get free health care by going to the emergency room, will continue to get free health care because only the low income people will get the best coverage for the lowest price or even free coverage! Yes I said free, some plans for SOME people are FREE! Mean while the 20 somethings will be paying for health care they cant afford because they get no government aide, because they have a job and make too much to get government aid. So Mr. president just who are you REALLY trying to help?
Ah! The old Percentage v. Head-Count dance.
I’ve always said, when someone gives you a percentage, convert it into a head-count; when someone gives you a head-count, convert it into a percentage.
Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that Gruber’s estimate is accurate, 3% of a population of 330,000,000 is 9,900,000.
Jonathan Gruber writes that only 3% of the population will be financially hurt by Obamacare. Jonathan Gruber means: “We don’t give a rat’s patoot about what happens to 9.900.000 Americans.”
This from a group of academic/political elites that agonize over even one person being offended by the name of a football team.
(sarc on) So who was it that said something about breaking some eggs to make an omlet?(sarc off)
I’m going for the trifecta: a deluded, lying crook.
What if those 9.9 million were all Transgendered, or Black, or Lesbos?
ALL:
WARCOM and GROUP TWO/ONE have pushed out the uniform policy for NWU III and any patches worn on the sleeve.
All personnel are only authorized to wear the matching “AOR” American Flag patch on the right shoulder. You are no longer authorized to wear the “Don’t Tread On Me” patch.
Again the only patch authorized for wear is the American flag on the right shoulder. Please pass the word to all.
Thanks.
Senior Enlisted Advisor
[Name Redacted]
A new U.S. Navy directive mandates that SEALs replace the traditional “Don’t Tread On Me” Navy Jack on the sleeves of their uniforms with the American flag.
Too smart to be President. Is that really Barack Obama’s problem? Mika Brzezinski thinks so.
So let’s get this straight. The promise made by Barack Obama from 2007 forward all the way through the 2012 election, made dozens if not hundreds of times in those five years, meant that you could keep the plan you liked only if we never enacted the reform he proposed? I’ve heard some pretty fanciful spin on the “keep your plan” promise, but that really does take the cake. “Never made clear,” indeed.
Here’s another question for Senator Feinstein. You voted for this bill and helped push it through Congress with zero Republican votes. Why is it only now that we find out that you had no idea how this bill, drafted in the Senate by senior Democratic leadership, would impact Americans who liked the insurance they already had? Why did it take Senator Feinstein, a senior member of Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill herself, more than three and a half years to figure this out – and not even to a certainty, if one is to believe this spin cycle yesterday on CBS News?
Don carlos,
That was never going to be a problem because this was engineered to hit the working middle class just like gun control is designed to penalize the law-abiding as a reaction to those who disregard the law anyway.
“so we get to the end of the rule of law.
That’s right. It’s the thing to keep ever foremost in the mind unless you are interested in discussing the color schemes or menus available for barracks life.
Obamacare and the individual mandate is outright fascism plain and simple; brought to us by the modern liberal kind, and certain cowardly Republicans. Chief Justice John Roberts for instance.
We can shrug at or argue about who or what percentage of the population are going to be hurt or sacrificed “to the greater good” through the institution of this government enforced and open ended “commitment to a shared fate” and to life energy and prospects transfer, if that is what turns some of us on. As it apparently does.
Tugging here and there at the harness they have been fitted with, does indeed seem to strike some people as the best means of addressing the problem.
It strikes me as quibbling over who is going to be shot first after you have conceded to another the right to do it to you in the first place.
But there is no getting around the fact that fascism is what Obamacare is regardless; that many “Americans” are happy with it; and that fascism is now proved as the aim of the Democrat part and its client class.
Once a person accepts that the Leftist alliance is evil and that its founding member, the Democrat party intends to do evil, that it isn’t incompetence or unintended mistakes, then the premise makes everything else make sense.
DNW, 12:44 pm — “Obamacare and the individual mandate is outright fascism plain and simple; brought to us by the modern liberal kind, and certain cowardly Republicans. Chief Justice John Roberts for instance.”
This was such an unexpected opinion by Roberts, that I got to thinking, did somebody get certain goods on Roberts and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse? (Not that I’m the only one who has taken to considering that.)
I’m reasonably wary of conspiracy-nut-ism, but when other, more rational (mainstream) explanations stop making sufficient sense, other explanations gain plausibility.
See you at the fringes?
“…that many “Americans” are happy with it
That’s an assumption on your part. Just because they haven’t voiced their concerns doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly approve of this.
Polls may tell you that a majority of Americans don’t want full repeal. Polls would also tell you that a majority of Americans want free stuff.
It’s very easy for people to say they want all sorts of things if they never consider the consequences. Of course, that is unrealistic.
Well, reality is coming home to roost now. IMO, the clearest indicators of the public’s TRUE (i.e. fully-considered) opinions are the quotes we’ve seen to the effect of “I wanted universal coverage before I saw that *I* would be paying for it.”
As more people become “reacquainted” with reality through policy cancellations and sticker shock, this feeling will grow.
That is the natural result of “letting it burn.”
M J R:
The details of how Roberts would get to the ruling to uphold Obamacare were indeed unexpected, because his reasoning was so bad. But the decision was not unexpected.
I expected it, for example, and I can’t imagine that I was alone (see this, for example). In a piece I wrote just a few days before the ruling, I said:
And that, IMHO, is why Roberts ruled as he did, rather than any threat of blackmail by Obama. Not that Obama wouldn’t try, but I don’t really think Roberts has any skeletons in his closet or they would have come out during his confirmation. The law of parsimony dictates that what I wrote above would have been enough to explain his ruling without such threats.
I wasn’t alone in my opinion, but I was lonely. Not too many people agreed with me prior to the ruling, I have to say. Too bad they were wrong; I would have much preferred to have been wrong.
Not all that much on the fringe I think. Whether it was a ‘switch in time that saved nine’ type of politically motivated fear, or something personal, or perhaps even social, it seems apparent from the change of stance and the strained reasoning with its non sequitur fig leaf that something got to him.
Could be that he did the mainstream Republican shuffle without any overt threats being implied regarding his adopted kids or even the status of the court.
That would be a decision taken on the basis that the maintenance of “social peace” and the reputation of cohesive government is considered more important than that particular liberty or the upholding of constitutional government on clear principles. Method: Calculate who is less inhibited and will go violent first, and decide against the group that is less likely to react that way. “More important that we have functioning government, than constitutional government” goes the reasoning. There is after all, so much need! (Wring hands appropriately)
And Republicans also often back off a fight and let the left have its way, if they think a large number of bovine and rather stupid bystanders will be hurt; ‘rending the social fabric even more’.
Even Republicans, some of them, seem to have a pretty powerful, and contemptible, herd instinct.
NeoneoCon wrote,
I agreed with your expectation, just as I did regarding Romney’s chances.
But I don’t see Robert’s reluctance as much based on principle as fear of what upholding the Constitution would do politically – to the political and social fabric.
There’s already so much verbiage in past decisions about the right and power of the Federal Government to reach down into individual lives, that it probably didn’t seem so egregious an opinion to him. I believe you are the one who has twice posted on the atrocity of the Agricultural Adjustment Act case.
That is, he saw our system’s “working arrangements” as more important that the principle in this case. The same “keep the social peace” and “Whose ox is being gored” kinds of crap which we learned in Const Hist to be the hidden drivers behind so many jurists’ opinions.
Now, would I rate some fear of an attack on the court as highly? No. Just slightly higher than I would rate his fear of having to live under an incessant and sustained barrage of questions and attacks about how he got two little blond children to adopt. Both, qualifying as just possibly contributing emotional motivators.
Neo,
If memory serves the Supreme Court decision did rule that a mandate would be unconstitutional if it were, in fact, a mandate. The problem was the contorted logic which explained it as not a mandate but a tax (I confess to not having read the actual text).
The sad thing is that this is the judiciary twisting, turning, dodging and prevaricating as much as Congress did to pass the act in the first place.
We’re in the best of hands. As I noted in your Cutler post, the country is being run from Cambridge and New Haven, and not by a thousand people selected at random from the Boston White Pages.
Roberts said it was a tax. Despite all evidence from the debates in Congress to the contrary. This also in contradiction to the assertion that it was NOT a tax, so that the SCOTUS could hear the case. (Anti-injunction act)
I’m not trained in law at all, and even *I* know that’s a load of crap.
Matt_SE:
It was a terrible decision. The justices who concurred with him that Obamacare was constitutional, by the way, did not concur with Roberts on that particular point (that it was a tax). I seem to recall he was alone in saying that.
If you do a search here you’ll see a bunch of posts I wrote at the time on the matter.
The theory is that Obama found out about Roberts family situation and blackmailed him over threats to confiscate his kids.
Similar to the Petraeus testimony over Benghazi.