HEY, TAXING THE YOUNG IS ALL THE RAGE NOW: Tax Agency Comes After My 12-Year-Old Nephew.
Archive for 2013
November 4, 2013
ALL CRITICS MUST BE SMEARED. IT’S S.O.P. FOR THESE GUYS: Despicable: WH smears cancer survivor who lost her insurance plan due to Obamacare.
VIDEO: George Will speaks at BYU.
MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRAT: Why are we sending welfare EBT money overseas?
OOPS: Story on low interest rates was from Sri Lanka, and I didn’t notice b/c I scheduled it on my first cup of coffee. Sorry!
IN THE MAIL: Surviving Inside Congress.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 179.
COMPETENCE: CBS: White House warned three years ago that ObamaCare was running off the rails. “Remember when you’re watching this that it pertains to the same people who now argue that they know better than you about what kind of insurance coverage you need. CBS News reports that an internal memo warned the White House three years ago that the Healthcare.gov project was turning into a disaster, and that no one with any expertise had control of the project.”
And note that this was before the 2010 elections had given the Republicans back the House, making Obama-apologists’ efforts to blame the GOP or the Tea Party movement even lamer.
AMERICANS FINDING OUT THEY WERE SOLD A LEMON:
There’s a reason that unions fight so hard to keep their gold-plated insurance, even making significant salary concessions to do so, and that’s because their members really want low-deductible insurance.
U.S. cost-sharing is actually low, by international standards; just 23 percent of our private health spending comes from out-of-pocket expenditures by the consumers of health care. We like being insulated from costs, and we’re rich enough to demand it. Assuming that the Cadillac tax goes into effect (though I’m still sort of skeptical), a whole lot of those in the 80 percent category are going to lose a plan they liked because the government made it too expensive for companies to keep delivering it. Yes, of course, companies already cancel plans quite frequently. But these cancellations are going to happen all at once, because the law demanded it.
Moreover, the people who end up in those plans won’t just be choosing them as the cost of other plans goes up; they’ll be forced into them because the other plans aren’t offered at all. They are going to be screaming mad, and Democrats should not delude themselves that they will be soothed by all the marvelous things that may then be happening in the individual market. That’s why I still think there is a good chance that this gets rolled back before it goes into effect — but that is going to create its own, not insubstantial, budget problem: The Cadillac tax is supposed to raise about $80 billion by 2023.
And this just looks at price, not things such as provider networks, which is going to bring on a long and lasting wave of public outrage starting sometime around March of next year.
It’s like some sort of train wreck or something. Hey, maybe if someone had actually read the bill before it was passed . . . .
ED DRISCOLL INTERVIEWS Virginia Postrel, on her new book, The Power Of Glamour.
AT AMAZON, wireless color printers under $100.
Also, up to 75% off on shoes. For men, women, and kids.
And, today only: PORTER-CABLE Oscillating Multitool Kit, $79.00 (72% off).
Also today only: LorexBaby BB3521 Care ‘n’ Share Baby Monitor, $89.99 (50% off).
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Book Obama Didn’t Read, And Should Have.
I’M SURPRISED IT WASN’T “BEST VIEWED IN NETSCAPE 4.76:” Oregon Health Exchange Website Only Works With Internet Explorer.
IT WILL HAPPEN, ONE FINE THERMIDOR: Michelle Obama Says Kids Will One Day Trick-or-Treat for Vegetables. Or actually, I guess it would be the month of Brumaire.
THE ECONOMIST CATCHES UP WITH REALITY: Whoops: Barack Obama’s supporters are worried that he is a terrible manager. This was apparent to more skilled observers sometime in 2009.
I BELIEVE THE APPROVED TERM IS “DIGITAL BROWNSHIRTS:” Obama Using “Twitter Army” To Attack Negative Stories On ObamaCare.
UPDATE: The Twitter account for MyCancellation.com — where people share their ObamaCare cancellation letters — “may be subject to an organized fake Twitter spam report cabal.”
Related: Obamacare truth hurts: Why is @MyCancellation suspended? Again.
NEW SPIN FROM DIANNE FEINSTEIN: The President meant you could keep your plan until we enacted ObamaCare. You can’t make this stuff up. Plus: “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?”
Passage of ObamaCare was a complete dereliction of duty.
CRONY CORPORATISM: If Big Pharma likes your healthcare plan, you can keep it. “Almost always, the rules ended up how they ended up because special interests with insider access were able to tweak them. So it is with the coverage that Obamacare mandates. HHS’s first proposed rule on prescription drug coverage required insurers to cover at least one drug in every class of drug — in short, one drug for cholesterol, one drug for epilepsy, etc. Drugmakers wanted more. Led by the lobby group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry argued that HHS should require all insurers to not only cover one drug per class, but also to match the benchmark plan in their state. And Big Pharma won. . . . So if your insurance plan met state mandates and covered one or more drug per class, it still might be illegal if it didn’t cover as much as the “benchmark” insurance plan. PhRMA and its member companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer care about this in part because more bare-bones prescription drug plans may cover only generic drugs and not the more costly name brand drugs covered by the benchmark plans. The more comprehensive the drug coverage, the more expensive the premiums — thus the cancellation of many low-premium plans. This wasn’t the only win for drugmakers in Obamacare, of course. The industry famously got a prime seat at the drafting table of Obamacare (and thus a slew of subsidies and favors) in exchange for millions of dollars in ads supporting the legislation — and ads backing the Democratic senators endangered by voting for it.”
I THOUGHT THE TEA PARTY WAS DEAD AND GONE. I’M SURE I READ THAT SOMEWHERE. McCauliffe & Obama Hold Rally in Virginia… Tea Party Breaks Out (Video). Obama shouldn’t be able to go anywhere without meeting people with “You Lie” signs.
SALENA ZITO: ObamaCare Only Deepens The Disconnect Between Main Street and Washington.
It is staggering to consider that, within a brisk walk of each other, so much money, power and influence is amassed – and even more staggering to consider the impact these have on our lives.
Those lives are not anecdotes but knee-weakening realities, as in the case of Genevieve Ward of Belle Vernon.
Her insurance company informed her this week that Obamacare would force her out of her existing plan, leaving a sad choice: reduced benefits or increased costs.
The 84-year-old widow, whose husband worked at now-defunct Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, saw her payment for out-of-pocket expenses go from $3,400 to $6,700; the co-pay cost for a hospital stay went from zero to $200 a day.
“I think it’s terrible. They shouldn’t be canceling what I have,” she said. “They are raising my prices and taking away privileges.” She and her friends were so distraught that they skipped their weekly card club, she said.
Ward’s letter contradicts Obama’s repeated promise that, if you like your doctor and your health-care plan, you could keep it, “Period.”
Read the whole thing, which is one of Zito’s best.
TAXABLE TALK on the IRS Scandal: “For the IRS to function effectively, it needs both a reasonable budget and to be apolitical. It’s vital that the Department of Justice go after individuals who turn the IRS into a political organization from an apolitical one. Yet the current Administration apparently doesn’t see the urgency in this issue. That’s a huge mistake, and one that will definitely come back to haunt them and all Americans. We need a well functioning IRS…and given what the Administration is doing (and not doing), it’s very likely the budget for the IRS will continue to shrink.”
WHY IS THIS NOT A SURPRISE? Martha Coakley’s Campaign Finances In Disarray.
CHANGE! Wisconsin Teachers Sue to Support Gov. Walker’s Act 10. “Arguably, the biggest state education story of 2011 was the political war between Wisconsin teachers’ unions and GOP Gov. Scott Walker over the latter’s ultimately successful proposal (Act 10) to severely restrict collective bargaining rights for educators in the state. But as the law has labored its way through and been tested in the state’s courts, there’s been an interesting development—a small group of teachers has filed suit to uphold some of the act’s provisions.”