sticker shock – Moe Lane

Quote of the Day, Embrace The Healing Power Of “And,” Brother @charlescwcooke edition.

Charles C.W. Cooke, in the process of pointing out that Obamacare was sold to us as a money-saver – and that the Left is now apparently stupid enough to think that we’re stupid enough not to have noticed – writes:

[Barack Obama’s] central claim [in 2008] — that premiums would drop for the typical family by $2,500 — could literally have been taken from the back of an envelope. As the New York Times explained back in 2008, the $2,500 number came from economist David Cutler, who predicted that Obamacare would reduce all health-care spending by $200 billion a year. Candidate Obama, looking for a good sound bite, simply divided this number by the number of families in the United States; then, calculating inexplicably that total health-care spending and family health-insurance premiums were exactly the same thing, he concluded that all money saved would be returned to the people. That Obama considered this a reasonable way of selling a plan that reorganized one-sixth of the economy betrays either a fundamental economic illiteracy or a deeply troubling readiness to mislead.

Continue reading Quote of the Day, Embrace The Healing Power Of “And,” Brother @charlescwcooke edition.

Sticker Shock: Californians suddenly discover why all the Republican shouting over #Obamacare.

And BOOM goes the dynamite.

Meet Tom Waschura, Californian, father of two – oh, and right: Obama supporter. Just got a letter from his healthcare provider telling him that his private health insurance just went up by ten grand a year:

“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.

“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”

Let me tell you a secret: we don’t need people like Mr. Waschura to love us. We just need people like him to vote their class interests, to quote the Marxists who unaccountably confidently expect this rotating disaster of a health care rationing system to fuel public outcry for socialized medicine. They don’t have to vote Republican forever, you know. We’ll be happy if they vote Republican just enough to allow the party to kill this thing. With that in mind, let me just be the first to assure Mr. Waschura that his hope that the rates will be adjusted down in a few years is only half-justified: left unchecked, they will be adjusted. Only upwards. The Democrats always expected and planned that Obamacare would be funded by raiding the incomes of as many people as possible; making the insurance companies the mechanism for jacking up premiums was the only way to get the insurance companies on-board.

In other words, Mr. Waschura: what happened to you was not a bug in the system. It is the system. And now you have to ask yourself: are you really prepared to pay ten grand a year and rising for the privilege of having a legislator theatrically agree with you on, say, first-trimester abortion? – Because I’m sure that the California Republican party will be able to find a candidate that won’t go out of his or her way to aggravate you on that topic.

Continue reading Sticker Shock: Californians suddenly discover why all the Republican shouting over #Obamacare.

Some insurers may extend existing policies until after 2014 elections.

Well, we had to pass the bill before w… oh, never bloody mind.

At issue is a little-known loophole in President Obama’s landmark legislation that enables health insurers to extend existing policies for nearly all of 2014. This runs contrary to the widespread belief that all health insurance must immediately comply with new federal rules starting Jan. 1, when most provisions of the law take effect.

“Insurers are onto this, and the big question is how many will try to game the system,” said Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, a law professor and health policy expert at Washington and Lee University.

‘Loophole’ being defined creatively here, of course. As is ‘game the system.’ Or perhaps not: if Obamacare teaches us anything, it’s that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are ear-bleedingly bad when it comes to constructing legislation. There could be a clause in there that mandates that every child in America gets a pretty, pretty pony to sacrifice to Cthulhu in 2017 and we’d never know until a bureaucrat happens across the relevant clause. Continue reading Some insurers may extend existing policies until after 2014 elections.