JFK’s assassination: fifty years

The New Neo Posted on by

The assassination of JFK has been fading slowly from memory, becoming ever more the stuff of legend because no one under fifty personally remembers anything about it, and everyone over fifty has probably said almost all there is to say (much of it false) over and over and over again.

But the anniversary is here nevertheless, and in remembrance of the occasion I’m re-posting this contemporaneous description of the immediate aftermath of the assassination. It was written by John Updike and appeared originally in The New Yorker. For me, it conjures up the jumbled surreal quality of the horror and the riveting fascination of the non-stop television coverage (something quite new in our experience) very well:

It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved, only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses; temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.

I’ve written before about my rejection of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, and the reasons I came to that conclusion (here and here). I’ll repeat a quote from Vincent Bugliosi that I featured in one of those posts:

It is remarkable that conspiracy theorists can believe that groups like the CIA, military-industrial complex, and FBI would murder the president, but cannot accept the likelihood, even the possibility, that a nut like Oswald would flip out and commit the act, despite the fact that there is a ton of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy, and not an ounce showing that any of these groups had anything to do with the assassination.

It is further remarkable that these conspiracy theorists aren’t troubled in the least by their inability to present any evidence that Oswald was set up and framed. For them, the mere belief or speculation that he was is a more-than-adequate substitute for evidence. More importantly, there is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don’t realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world – you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera – you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you”¦

”¦[T]he evidence against Oswald is so great that you could throw 80% of it out the window and there would still be more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt”¦

The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists display an astonishing inability to see the vast forest of evidence proving Oswald’s guilt because of their penchant for obsessing over the branches, even the individual branches. And, because virtually all of them have no background in criminal investigation, they look at each leaf (piece of evidence) by itself, hardly ever in relation to, and in the context of, all the other evidence.

And to bring us up to date, the NY Times was ready for this week’s anniversary by pretending that righties in Dallas were somehow responsible for killing Kennedy because they “willed” it. Vulcan mind-meld, anyone?

It’s never been easy for the left to admit that a Communist killed JFK. So, as the event recedes into the ever-more-distant background, why not recycle the tired old tried-and-untrue narrative that it was the fault of the right? The mechanism this time was a NY Times op-ed by James McAuley, entitled “The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye: Dallas’s Role in Kennedy’s Murder.” It begins:

For 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

How about a rewrite? If I were the editor of the paper, I might say:

For 50 years, the left has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “progressives,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “people of hate,” the group that wills the death of anyone they don’t agree with.

McAuley seems to be working out some Dallas family demons of his own in the article (you have to read the whole thing to see what I’m talking about). But the “Wanted” posters in Dallas that day fifty years ago that McAuley mentions (put out, by the way, by General Edwin Walker’s group) were mild compared to what the left would generate forty-odd years later on a daily basis against George W. Bush, and the famous ad in the Dallas paper that day was likewise a relatively ordinary series of questions highly critical of his policy, its black border only taking on an especially ominous significance afterward.

It’s hard to believe the Dallas right was an inspiration for the actual killer, the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, who in another strange coincidence had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Walker himself just a few months before Oswald’s successful attack on Kennedy. As for the influence of Dallas on Oswald, he had only lived there (or in nearby Fort Worth) for the years from first to sixth grade, spending the bulk of his youth in New Orleans, with a two-year stay in New York (the Bronx, to be specific) and then back to New Orleans: “By the age of 17, he had resided at 22 different locations and attended 12 different schools.”

Oswald had dropped out of school and joined the Marines, then defected to the USSR and lived there for nearly three years. He came back to Dallas because he had family there, attempted to kill General Walker about ten months later, almost immediately moved back to New Orleans for about five months, and then tried to get to Cuba through Mexico, and only returned to Dallas in early October 1963. He got the Texas School Book Depository job in mid-October, and started living in a Texas rooming house during the week and visiting his wife (who was living with friends in nearby Irving) on weekends.

A little over a month later, Kennedy visited Dallas—the motorcade route having been published in the newspaper just a few days earlier—and the rest, as they say, is history. But it’s hard to see Oswald as a product of Dallas in any meaningful way, much less of the right in Dallas.

Of course, none of this matters to the Times and writers like McAuley. They have their own bones to pick and their own fish to fry and their own use to make of the 50th anniversary of the assassination.

President Obama gives Pravda…

The New Neo Posted on by

…its talking points:

President Obama held an off-the-record meeting with MSNBC hosts and liberal pundits on Thursday, POLITICO has learned.

Present at the meeting: MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell, Washington Post economics blogger Ezra Klein, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Judd Legum, Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta, Salon political writer Brian Beutler and Fox News contributor Juan Williams…

The White House did not respond to a request for comment regarding the meeting.

And I am not making up that “talking points” idea:

As I reported earlier this month, Obama has held several meetings with thought leaders from across the political spectrum during his presidency. The liberal confabs are seen by the White House as an opportunity to shape talking points and shore up support from the base.

And here I thought President Obama had only one press secretary. Dummy me.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are racist. Against somebody, somewhere:

Apparently, it’s because people in some cultures don’t eat sandwich bread. Verenice Gutierrez, principal of Harvey Scott K-8 School in Portland explained to the Portland Tribune:

“Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year,” the Tribune said.

“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” Gutierrez asked. “Another way would be to say: ”˜Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”

”¦The Tribune noted that the school started the new year with “intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives,” to help educators understand their own “white privilege,” in order to “change their teaching practices to boost minority students’ performance.””Last Wednesday, the first day of the school year for staff, for example, the first item of business for teachers at Scott School was to have a Courageous Conversation ”” to examine a news article and discuss the ”˜white privilege’ it conveys,” the Tribune added.

I assume Gutierrez has never heard of the Cuban. Although I assume the Cuban is racist:

cuban

But whether PB&J sandwiches are racist or not, I think they’re mean. To me. Because I can’t eat peanut butter; it gives me migraines, even though I love it.

So when I’m queen I will ban all talk of them.

School discipline: affirmative inaction

The New Neo Posted on by

Somehow I missed this story when it first came out almost a year and a half ago, but let’s take a break for a moment from Obamacare and re-visit another travesty:

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”…

The progressives campaign for race-based discipline policies also won a victory in Maryland July 24.

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional level of school penalties, regardless of the behavior by members of each group.

The board’s decision requires that “the state’s 24 school systems track data to ensure that minority and special education students are not unduly affected by suspensions, expulsions and other disciplinary measures,” said a July 25 Washington Post report.

“Disparities would have to be reduced within a year and eliminated within three years,” according to the Post.

The state’s new racial policy was welcomed by progressives, including Judith Browne Dianis, a director of the D.C.-based Advancement Project. “Maryland’s proposal is on the cutting edge,” she told the Post.

Dianis’ project is also a law firm that litigates race-related questions, and it gains from laws and regulations that spur race-related legal disputes.

Equality of outcome has become the new religion. I use the word “religion” ironically, of course. But I chose it because this particular movement rests on the belief (or the pretense) that, any time members of a race or group defined as disadvantaged exhibit lesser achievements or undesirable behavior in some area, it must by definition be due to bigotry and discrimination, and that the situation needs to be rectified not by changing the behavior but by changing how that behavior is measured or judged. The goal is to equalize the outcomes for the races in the statistical sense.

It hurts society as a whole. But perhaps the ones who are the most damaged by it are the members of the disadvantaged group themselves.

Speaking of which, here’s another phenomenon that is no surprise.

A Republican fix?

The New Neo Posted on by

Holman Jenkins has a suggestion for a Republican “fix” for Obamacare:

What can be done is Congress creating a new option in the form of a national health insurance charter under which insurers could design new low-cost policies free of mandated benefits imposed by ObamaCare and the 50 states that many of those losing their individual policies today surely would find attractive.

What’s the first thing the new nationally chartered insurers would do? Rush out cheap, high-deductible policies, allaying some of the resentment that the ObamaCare mandate provokes among the young, healthy and footloose affluent.

These folks could buy the minimalist coverage that (for various reasons) makes sense for them. They wouldn’t be forced to buy excessive coverage they don’t need to subsidize the old and sick…

Because such a move could be sold as expanding the options under ObamaCare and lessening the burden of an unpopular mandate, it always had potential to draw Democratic support…

And, yes, this would also blow up the disingenuous financial engine of ObamaCare. This is a feature not a bug.

The ObamaCare exchanges would devolve into refuges for those who are medically uninsurable. But this seems increasingly likely to happen anyway. The federal government, having assumed the job of subsidizing these people, should do so honestly and openly.

So, what Jenkins seems to be proposing is not to repeal Obamacare (which probably wouldn’t be politically feasible anyway—yet) but to add a catastrophic insurance option free of the mandatory coverages such as maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder services, pediatric oral and vision care, and a host of others, that have raised the cost of Obamacare and which many people don’t want or need. He realizes that a lot of people would gravitate towards that catastrophic option instead of the plans Obamacare now offers, and the exchanges would basically become subsidized high-risk pools—somewhat like the ones the vast majority of states had to begin with before Obamacare led to those pools’ cancellation.

There’s an excellent argument to be made, though, that the GOP should hold fast to a repeal rather than a fix. There’s also some doubt as to whether the Senate would pass anything the GOP proposed, even now that the political climate has become far more hostile to Obamacare. And of course one must always remember that Obama has veto power, and it’s hard to imagine him not using it on a bill like this one. But there’s something to be said for Republicans taking charge and actually designing and passing a remedy that could help people with the problems they are now facing in the health insurance markets.

Republicans have been demonized for a long time as not caring about those without health insurance, although some Republicans have been suggesting a number of solutions for years that have been ignored. Actually passing something concrete would go far towards getting the public to realize that conservatives do have solutions to these things; they are just different solutions than liberals have come up with.

However, I’m not sure that Jenkins’ suggestion would do anything to solve the problem connected with the mandatory coverage of those with pre-existing conditions combined with the weakness of the penalty for not buying insurance (or the penalty’s possible unconstitutionality, despite whatever Justice Roberts might think). That problem is inherent in Obamacare, or in any scheme that mandates coverage of pre-existing conditions. Either penalties are weak (or non-existent) and premiums rise, or penalties must be strong. The first wrecks havoc with the health insurance market premiums and the second with liberty, especially if instituted at the federal level.

Senate Democrats say: hey, right about now would be a good time…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for the nuclear option.

Do they have the votes? Who knows:

…[E]ven if Reid doesn’t have the votes. He can’t keep threatening the GOP with the move and not pull the trigger at some point. For Senate Republicans, the threat and the action are now pretty much the same thing, as Reid has used it to break filibusters anyway. It’s practically a moot point already…

Actually, the minority won’t be entirely without tools…[O]ne Senator can object to each motion for unanimous consent and tie up the chamber in endless bill readings and other non-essential business…[I]f applied universally. Reid might find himself out of the frying pan and into the fire after this stunt. Instead of speeding up the Senate, it might mire it for good in endless bickering.

We’ll see what happens, but if Reid does pass this, expect Republicans to retaliate ”” and expect them to end the rest of the filibuster as soon as they have the majority.

Carping about the use of the filibuster for judicial appointments is the height of political hypocrisy for both parties, since both have used it for just that purpose when in the minority. The first nominiee successfully blocked by that method was Bush’s Miguel Estrada.

And both parties have at least threatened the nuclear option: here’s the history of that.

Signing up those young, healthy guys on the Obamacare exchanges

The New Neo Posted on by

We keep hearing that in order to keep from going under because of ever-increasing premiums, the Obamacare exchanges must enroll a lot of healthy young people. We even hear it from the White House, according to Ezra Klein:

How many younger people are needed each year to hold down premiums depends on how many people sign up for the marketplaces. If the total this year is 7 million people, then about 2.7 million need to be in the 18-to-35 set.

This group is “overwhelmingly male…majority nonwhite…[and] [o]ne out of every three lives in California, Florida or Texas.”

Why male? Why nonwhite? My guess would be because women and whites that age are somewhat more likely to have employment-based insurance and therefore wouldn’t be going to the exchanges (as long as their employers continue to offer the alternative).

Given that this young male non-white demographic is the group Obamacare’s exchanges are especially seeking, it also appears that, although it might be a young and healthy bunch, it’s not an especially solvent one:

Young adults are the cheapest group to insure but the group most likely to go without insurance. The reason, put simply, is that young adults are likelier than any other group to be poor. Smith calculates that 19 million young adults between 18 and 34 lack health insurance. Under Obamacare, 8 million of them will qualify for free insurance through Medicaid. An additional 9 million will qualify for subsidized insurance in the exchanges.

In fact, the vast majority of the young adults expected to be in the marketplaces are expected to qualify for subsidies. Linda Blumberg, a health-policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, has done extensive work modeling who is likely to sign up for insurance on the exchanges. She estimates that 96 percent of 21- to 27-year-olds will get some income subsidies

Wow. Let that sink in: the vast, vast majority of this “young and healthy” group they’re so very eager to get on the exchanges will be subsidized, and most will be pretty heavily subsidized at that (half will be on Medicaid, for example). So, why go after them? Signing them up would go far towards preventing the “death spiral” problem caused by the exchanges having too many old and sick people, but it certainly wouldn’t be likely to do much to reduce the amount Obamacare will cost the government, because of the high proportion of subsidies.

Therefore it’s hard not to conclude that the government is purchasing protection for the exchanges. Sign up for the free stuff, government says. We’ll pay you; it won’t cost you that much at all. And in turn, the government is counting on the fact that they won’t be making that many claims, which will balance out the other enrollees who’ll be making a lot of claims.

The insurance companies will get their money just the same; what do they care if it comes from the insured person him/herself or from the federal government? It’s the same money, and it keeps them from having to raise premiums if the whole scheme works as planned. Who loses? The taxpayer, because it’s difficult if not impossible to believe that this arrangement will be deficit neutral, and can be paid for by the existing tax structure that’s supposed to finance Obamacare.

Switched at birth

The New Neo Posted on by

Can anyone make sense of this story?

I know it’s about two babies switched at birth. I know there was a controversial court case and a custody battle. And I know everybody’s happy now, eighteen years later.

But the rest of it is just too Byzantine to follow. As one of the commenters to the article wrote:

In order for me to completely understand this story, I’m going to have to draw stick figures with little kids and moms and dads. And aunts. And someone who fell in love with someone else. Never mind.

I thought about diagrams and a chart, too. But then I just gave up.

And turned to this. Security has gotten a lot tighter at hospitals since I gave birth many moons ago. I had what was called “rooming in,” though, and only stayed in the hospital one night, so my baby was pretty much with me the whole time.

Stop me before I tell you my labor story.

The LA Times…

The New Neo Posted on by

…manages to write an entire article on how well Obamacare enrollments are going in California without ever once mentioning:

(1) what percentage of enrollees are subsidized

(2) what percentage have pre-existing conditions

(3) what percentage of enrollees are under 35

In other words: the Times fails to mention a single fact about the pool of people who have enrolled except the total number. Actually, they don’t even tell the total number, but I calculate from their little hints (“California ”” which enrolled about 31,000 people in health plans last month ”” nearly doubled that in the first two weeks of this month”) that it’s close to 60,000.

Considering that about a million policies were cancelled in California alone, and that California had projected a need for exchange signups totaling 1.4 million in 2014, that’s not especially impressive.

Plus, 79,500 people also signed up for Medicaid in California (Medical) in October. So far, the Medicaid enrollments seem to be way outpacing the Obamacare ones.

Benificiary of Obamacare gets incredibly rude and complex awakening…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but still believes in Obama.

Here’s a textbook case of the liberal mindset. Jessica Sanford of western Washington state was so happy with the initial Obamacare premiums she was quoted by the state website that she sent off a grateful letter to President Obama which he featured in a speech three weeks ago. But since then, Sanford’s been informed—well, you have to read the Byzantine story for yourself, because it’s still not all that clear how much Sanford will be actually end up paying for herself and her 14-year-old son who has ADHD, because the news keeps changing.

The one constant is that the news is not good. First she was informed her subsidy would be less than she originally was told, but it was still something she thought she could swing. Next she was told no subsidy would be forthcoming at all, because her son had been enrolled in Medicaid and that meant her income level was figured as though she were a single person, which disqualified her for subsidies. Then she was told her son’s Medicaid enrollment could be rescinded if she liked. But that turns out to be difficult to actually accomplish, although one customer in the state of Washington has apparently been able to do it—so there’s hope, right?

Sanford is upset, but it’s clear who she doesn’t blame—President Obama:

I don’t want to be bashing the president. I don’t want to be bashing the ACA. I don’t want to come across as saying that. I’m a big Obama fan.

But to me there’s a big problem with the way the state is handling it. You put your stuff in there and once you do it, it is impossible to do anything…So you are stuck on this big treadmill of bureaucracy, and you know, if feels very out of control.

Yes, it’s the state’s fault, because of course—as everyone knows—the federal bureaucracy is so much homier and cozier, and what’s going on right now in the state of Washington re Obamacare has nothing to do with the feds, nothing at all.

Sanford is really a perfect example of the difficulty of changing a mind and a political affiliation. People often resist making the connections that would cause the feeling of discombobulation that would come from having to give up previous notions of the good and the bad, and the need to change political affiliations as a result.

I’m not surprised by the bureaucracy and the screw-ups she has encountered—or even by Sanford’s tendency to stand by her man and her party. But there’s another part of this story that did astound me, which is that a single woman making $50K a year and having one child would qualify for Medicaid for the child. Here are the rules (I’m not sure whether this is just the way the state of Washington does it, or if these are the rules for any state that has accepted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare): at up to 200% of poverty level, children are automatically enrolled in Medicaid when the family signs up at the state exchange. From 200% to 250% of family poverty level, children are eligible to do so but enrollment is optional, and the parent must pay premiums of $20 a month per child (capped at $40 per month for total children). From 250% to 300% of poverty level, enrollment is also optional, and premiums are $30 a month per child.

That’s a lot of kids qualifying for Medicaid. Take a look at this chart for the poverty guidelines:

poverty2013

Notice, for example, that a family of four (a couple with two children, let’s say) would be forced to enroll its two children in Medicaid if the couple’s income was under $47,100, and the couple’s own premiums would now be figured as though they were a family of two, which would decrease their subsidies. Using this general calculator for Obamacare, and if the couple were Sanford’s age of 48, a family of four with that income would pay $2964 a year out-of-pocket for silver plan coverage, whereas a family of two with the same income would pay $4488 because their subsidies would be lower based on their higher percentage of poverty level. So by enrolling the children in Medicaid (which would be compulsory), the family loses $1524 a year, at least for premiums (which might be offset by reduced co-pays and deductibles, however; that’s a more complex calculation, because a family under 250% of poverty level gets a reduction in the usual co-pays and deductibles on the exchange plans, as well).

It also means that same family of 4 making up to $70650 a year (300% of poverty level) would be able to enroll its children in Medicaid for a small fee if they so chose. That sort of income for a couple with two children isn’t exactly wealthy, but Medicaid? Of course, Medicaid is such third-class insurance that not many people in the $70K category would willingly choose it—especially since, by taking the Medicaid option for their children, they’d be paying $8580 out-of-pocket for their own insurance (which would now be figured as a couple only) versus the $6708 they’d be paying as a family of four (after subsidies, which they would be eligible for as a family but not as a couple).

One of the many things wrong with Obamacare is that the subsidy structure contains a vast number of inequities such as this. Even if you agree with the basic idea—as Sanford seems to—the anomalies are legion in practice. Some may be intentional but some seem unintentional and random and even perverse. Plus, the complexity is immense, and the opportunities to game the system for those who master that complexity are immense as well. And this is true without even figuring in the similarly vast opportunities for fraud.

Bruce Barcott, who also lives in Washington state and also was a big Obama supporter, got a similarly rude awakening to Sanford’s. Although the details are somewhat different, and he never wrote a letter of thanks to the president that he now has to walk back, he’s unexpectedly much worse off after Obamacare than before.

Barcott has a friend in a similar fix who called a lawyer-accountant for advice and was told this:

I can’t ethically advise you, because honestly I don’t know the right thing to do. Nobody does. There are no answers. Right now it’s a complete clusterfuck.

Now, there’s an honest man.

But unlike Sanford, Barcott is angry at Obama. And he even understands the irony of it:

Once the sound of boiling blood dissipated, in my head I heard my Republican friends chuckling at the sight of a liberal Democrat hoisted ten stories high on his own petard. How’s the view up there, Obamacare Ollie?

One of the interesting things about what’s happening in the individual insurance market is that many of these people are self-employed self-starters, some of them (like Barcott) are freelance writers. They are articulate. And they write. I don’t know whether Barcott’s mugging by Obamacare reality will lead to deeper realizations and changes in his basic political beliefs, but I think with someone like him there’s a chance.

Health insurance, “discrimination,” and smokers

The New Neo Posted on by

The insurance business is impossible without some sort of “discrimination“—as in “the ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment,” rather than ” bigotry or other arbitrary distinctions.”

But the Obama administration and liberals as a whole use the loaded word “discrimination” to mean something pejorative and/or unfair. They wouldn’t raise a hue and cry because life insurance discriminates against the elderly, or because flood insurance discriminates against those who live in flood plains. But that’s the way health insurance is commonly talked about: as unfairly discriminatory.

Compare and contrast: “Health insurance discriminates against people with pre-existing conditions!,” to “Health insurance discriminates against smokers!” Somehow, under Obamacare, the former is not okay but the latter is just fine.

Obamacare “discriminates” against the second but not the first. Smoking, of course, is considered an act of will, whereas being sick is not, although there are certainly other health habits (being a drug addict, for example) that are just as voluntary (or involuntary) as smoking and certainly very damaging to health, and yet people who engage in those activities are not penalized, and everyone is required to obtain insurance to pay for substance abuse treatment.

How much does Obamacare discriminate against smokers? A lot:

The ObamaCare smoker surcharge allows insurers to charge a “tobacco surcharge” which is calculated after subsidies received through the marketplace. Smokers may pay up to 50% more than non-smokers for the same health plans…

Smoking is not a pre-existing health condition under Obamacare. As part of the negotiations to get coverage for those with preexisting conditions, insurance companies got the right to impose on smokers premium costs that are as much as 50 percent higher than the same plan for non-smokers…

The Smoker Glitch is an anomaly in the government’s computer payment computer systems that won’t process the tobacco surcharge correctly and won’t be fixed until at least 2015. While the smoking surcharge can be up to three time the non-tobacco rate, programmers cannot get the system to make the calculations.

Because the smoker surcharge is calculated after subsidies, it also discriminates against the poorer, who might even be unable to afford insurance because of it, especially the older poor or lower middle class. And wouldn’t they be among the people most in need of health care, and whom you would think Obamacare was designed to help? What’s more, Obamacare discriminates far more than older insurance policies used to (I remember looking at charts with the rates for non-smokers vs. smokers, and although the latter paid more, it never seemed anywhere near 50% more). Six states have prohibited the surcharge (California among them) and two have lowered it, and most people don’t think companies will end up charging the whole 50% more, but it is allowed (although no one will see it till they get the glitch fixed, which may be never).

Let me just add that Obamacare must be racist, as well, because smoking rates are higher among blacks and native Americans than among whites. Oops!