Obamacare web site security enhancements - revealed

It's a start, anyway.

So what has Obamacare done for employment?

350,000 jobs lost:

Businesses are cutting jobs due to ObamaCare, according to surveys by several regional Federal Reserve Banks.

Health economist John Goodman noted that "three Federal Reserve Banks in Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta have surveyed the folks in their area and roughly one fifth of the employers are saying they cut back on employment.

“Roughly one fifth are saying they're moving from full time to part time,” Goodman added. “More than one in ten are saying they're doing more outsourcing - all this because of the new health care reform."

Doug Holtz-Eakin, former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, said “for the smaller employers -- those that have between 20 and 49 employees -- you get a negative impact on jobs, you get a negative impact on wages in those jobs. What this means for small business as a whole is over $22 billion of earnings gone for their workers and 350,000 jobs."

Man, nobody could have seen that coming.  All the proof that you need that the GOP is the Stupid Party is that you don't have campaign ads 24/7 on this, featuring people who have been put out of work.  #GOPTooStupid2Live.

What the real Obamacare debate is about

Word.  This analysis is unimprovable.

Final thoughts on Halbig and Obamacare

Now that they passed the bill, Nancy Pelosi is finding out what's in it.

I crack myself up sometimes.  If I ever tweeted, I'd tweet this.  For a longer, in-depth (dare we call it "Borepatchian"?) analysis, this is outstanding.  Borepatchian, in fact.

Halbig v. Burwell, en banc hearing, and the future of Obamacare

Buddy 2cents (an actual bona fide lawyer, but don't hold it against him) emails to point out this:

President Obama’s old Harvard Law professor, Laurence Tribe, said that he “wouldn’t bet the family farm” on Obamacare’s surviving the legal challenges to an IRS rule about who is eligible for subsidies that are currently working their way through the federal courts.

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Tribe told the Fiscal Times. “But I wouldn’t bet the family farm on this coming out in a way that preserves Obamacare.”

Tribe, of course, is famously progressive in his views, and he's not exactly all sunshine and kittens about Obamacare's chances.  My thought was that the DC Court of Appeals is one of the most left leaning in the land, and an en banc hearing (where all the judges sit on the case, not just three) might give a different result.  I asked his opinion, and here is his opinion as a lawyer:

Moot point.  And if anything, I would put more money on the 4^th Circuit taking THAT case en banc.  The 4^th Circuit is more conservative than the DC Circuit is liberal.  Either way, there will be a split of the Circuits before too long.  The Supremes will end up deciding this one.  And I cannot see how this Court could do anything other than decide the same way as the DC Circuit did.  The statue is clear on its face.  Harry Reid’s office kept submitting the same language.  No one ever questioned it.  On top of that, as you may recall, SCOTUS only upheld HCA as an exercise of Congress’s power to tax.  The IRS has no power to interpretively impose new taxes.  They have NO power to tax.  Finally, revisionist history aside, the language of the statue very much fits Congress’s intent.  Let us not forget that, when the passed Obamacare, it was assumed by one and all that the States would jump right in and set up exchanges.  The Federal exchange was only envisioned as a stop gap back up plan.  Of course, politics, the economy and everything else intervened.  As a result, the obvious rush to participate has ended up with only 16 states setting up their own exchanges.  And Lord knows that this is not the first time that Congress wrote a law screwed up because they drew an erroneous conclusion resulting in a failed prediction.

So there you have it.  Things are not looking good for Obamacare at all.  It's not dead, but it looks like it's coughing up blood.

Someone needs to be fired

Maybe prosecuted.

The soul-crushing bureaucracy of Britain's National Health Service

We're told by the Right Sort Of People® that we need to be more like Europe.  Obamacare is shaping up to be a disaster, and so all the Right Sort Of People® who told us it was all going to be awesome are now saying that of course, what we really need is "Single Payer".  Because that would make us just like Europe.

Oooh kaaay, so how's that going to work out for us in the future, say, fifty years from now?  Well, how's that working out for Europe?  How's Britain's NHS doing, 60 years after its founding?

How about we ask a UK NHS Doctor for his opinion?

I still do work for the National Health Service (NHS), although not full time. Over the years, and especially the last few years, it has become an increasingly depressing, target driven, soulless place. When I re-read [George Orwell's] 1984 recently, virtually every page resonated with the type of management nonsense that rains down upon us each day. Particularly the way that language is distorted into meaningless ‘party’ slogans.

...

One thing that particularly sticks in my craw, are the pictures of happy staff members that adorn various PR brochures.

...

When I opened it, I found that this was a brochure informing all nurses, and doctors, that we would have to pay considerably more money into our pensions. In addition, we were going to receive a much lower pension, at a greater age, than we had been told we were getting in the past. Oh joy, oh joy.

I would have said the picture on the front cover was ironic, but NHS management do not do irony. We are continually exhorted, in a ‘Unite workers of the Soviet Union’ sort of a way, to be smiling and happy in our glorious tractor factory. A frowning worker is a worker who clearly does not love the party with sufficient fervour. A frowning workers needs re-education.

It sounds like the Good Doctor is an Enemy Of The State™ and needs a dose of re-education, good and hard.  So what did he think he was getting in to, anyway?

I wanted to help old people
I got frailty assessments on incomplete information

...

I wanted to diagnose the cause of acute confusional states
I got dementia screening on frightened old people at 3am

...

I wanted role models to inspire me
I got multi-source feedback forms

I wanted to teach the next generation
I got work based assessment emails

...

I wanted to keep people alive, safe and comfortable
I got the four hour target, breach reports, and observation wards to fudge the targets

But hey - this is Britain, right?  Can't expect them to be civilized, what?  Never happen here, old chap.  I mean, lesser breeds from lesser climes, what?  I say, it looks like your Pim's is empty - Bar Man, another round if you please?  Do be a dear ...

A Christmas oopsie

Nintendo's new game console is the Wii U, and this holiday shopping season they've been pushing a deal of a console that comes with a Legend Of Zelda game (Yes, I spoil my kids rotten, but it keeps me in hugs).  The game doesn't come on a disk, but is downloaded from the Nintendo servers.  Which have been down all day.

It seems that lots of people got these consoles for their kids and everyone hit the servers at the same time.  And so the servers are doing an excellent impression of the Healthcare.gov exchange.

Fail.

Things I did not know

I did not know that President Obama's pajama boy has an imaginary Canadian girlfriend.  Snerk.

Of course, there's a Hello Kitty tie in.  I see this as the hand of your Gormogons in action. I mean, a lot of Obamacare is pretty well explained if you posit a time traveling robot, a blood soaked Autocrat, and a orbiting sun control satellite controlled by Confucius.  I mean, it all suddenly makes sense now, doesn't it?

Progressives and the Big Lie

... thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Last week I posted about the coming electoral disaster facing the Democratic Party: The Democrats are inextricably trapped by Obamacare.  A bunch of folks left comments that they were going to blame the Insurance Companies or the Republicans, and the Media will let them get away with it.  Essentially, the thrust of this view is that the Big Lie will save the Democrats from their folly.  It won't.

The problem is that the Big Lie requires two things to work:

1. Results cannot directly impact most of the population.  Hitler's policy on the Jews only was felt by the Jews; most Germans never felt any change to their lives.

2. A strict control of the information available to most of the population.  If something is never reported, nobody will know (or care).

The problem is that Obamacare violates Axiom #1 here.  Something like five million people (and counting) have lost their current health insurance and are scrambling to use the broken exchanges to get new plans that for many will cost more in monthly premiums, will have higher deductables, and will have higher annual out of pocket limits.  You can't hide that signal, because it shows up in a letter from the Insurance Company.

That will get enormously worse next year as Employer-covered plans run into the same regulations that have torpedoed the individual plans.  We can expect an order of magnitude more people to be impacted, likely in the run up to the election.

And here's where it won't help for the Democrats and the Media to point the finger at someone else - they lied to pass the law.  They lied repeatedly.  They promised that you could keep your plan.  They said your costs would go down.  They said it was going to be great.  They said it over and over.

And now people are seeing that it was a lie, and Obama's and the Democratic Party's poll numbers are nose diving.  Remember, that's with only 5 million or so people impacted.  Just wait until another 50 million get the cancellation noticed in the next Open Enrollment period.

Yes, of course the Democrats will try to blame someone else.  Of course the media will try to back them up.  The problem here is that between 50 Million and 100 Million people see them as liars.  And since their families will be directly impacted they'll be paying a lot of attention.  People complain about "low information voters" but the theory of Rational Ignorance explains almost all of that.  Rational Ignorance collapses in the face of the family's annual cost having to go up by 10% a year.

That leaves Axiom #1 of the Big Lie in smithereens.  People will be looking for someone to blame.  The question is who will get the blame.  The Democrats think that they can lie their way out of this.



They'll blink their Bambi Eyes at the people who lost their insurance because of "Obamacare".  They'll give a million excuses that "Obamacare" isn't their fault.  Yup, a real plan for success, given that the poll numbers are tanking because everyone thinks that Obama and the Democrats are liars.

And here's where it falls apart for the Democrats: Axiom #2 requires controlling the information that citizens receive about the Big Lie.  The Democrats' lies are all up on Youtube.  So riddle me this, Mr. Main Stream Media Man: who they going to believe - you or their lying eyes?

Vanna, why don't you tell the Democrats what their consolation prize is?

Sure, Borepatch!  A whole Metric c**pload of Democratic Senators and Representatives have just won a whole lot of time "to pursue personal interests".

Will they try to lie their way out of this?  Sure - after all, what choice do they have?  Will it work?  Good luck with that.