Wednesday, December 4, 2013

The Democrats are inextricably trapped by Obamacare

The Czar of Muscovy explains why Obama's "delays" won't - and can't - be actual delays:
Sure, the President has quietly issued executive order after executive order delaying parts of Obamacare...the most recent being this week, when small business owners were granted a one-year delay on bumping employees off in-house health plans. But none of this will do any good, because the President still hasn’t picked up Insurance For Dummies, although doubtless there are several copies on the Oval Office desk. The President can grant delays all he wants—the problem is that the healthcare carriers were not given a delay about a year ago, and have already terminated or started to terminate their old policies. Sorry: insurance isn&3146;t like issuing a library card where you can always roll back to the old way of doing it. Every type of policy has a prospectus written, for which the financial risks are calculated and a profit model demonstrated. This takes about a year to execute, so if the President really wanted to delay things another year, he should have issued his orders back in 2011 or 2012. Because he didn’t, it’s way too late: millions of cancellation letters will be going out throughout the Summer and Fall of 2014, pissing off untold numbers of voters.
It's not just hard to sell insurance, it's hard to make the policies so that they're legal.  The only thing I'd add is that the State Insurance Commissions have to sign off on the policies before they go into effect.  Next summer will see perhaps 100 Million voters realizing that Obamacare has caused their insurance to be cancelled.  Because of the way that Obamacare was structured ("spread the wealth around"), their new policies will be more expensive, have higher deductables, higher annual out-of-pocket caps, and smaller doctor networks.

And there just two things that the Democrats can do about it: Jack and s**t.  And it looks like Jack just left town.

Smartest guys in the room, right there.

7 comments:

Old NFO said...

They will do EVERYTHING they can to pawn it off on the Pubs, just like Kerry and the admin have done with Iran... sigh

Archer said...

As you said in an earlier post, it was passed purely along party lines.

The schadenfreude will be epic and delicious.

Goober said...

The problem is that then they'll have the ability to blame it all on the "greedy" insurance companies, who canceled all of these poor individuals before they really had to in order to drive up profits and make money off the backs of the little guy.

You can count on that. And you can also count on the media carrying that water for them, and you can also count on the insurance companies going along with that narrative, too, because how insane would they have to be to stand up to this power-mad federal government?

Nope, i think they knew exactly what they were doing when they did it. i think they knew at the time that this entire mess was one big soup sandwich and they did the delay thing with one idea in mind - to scapegoat the insurance companies.

ASM826 said...

No, they can blame the Republicans. And they will.

kotetu said...

And sadly, the massive victories by Republicans will not bear the fruits of limited government, but instead promises of a decade long plan to reduce the deficit, a 'better' national healthcare plan, more 'security' and less liberty.

ProudHillbilly said...

And what kotetu said is my concern.

Goober said...

Who really cares if they blame the republicans? The replublicans are the exact same thing as the democrats, just with a few topical differences.

My fear is that they will blame the industry; because how does government punish industry?

How have they always punished industry?

When has that ever worked out well for anyone but the government and their cronies?