JAMES TARANTO: ObamaCare’s Sex Problem: Too many women is another sign of adverse selection.

It can’t be stressed enough that the real story is almost certainly far worse than the age distribution would suggest. The reason the age distribution is important is that younger people tend to be healthier, meaning that they consume less medical service and are cheaper to insure. But some young people are sick too, and if they are the ones buying ObamaCare policies, that aggravates selection despite their tender years. But while this problem can be identified and anticipated, there is no way to estimate its magnitude. Insurance companies no longer ask about pre-existing conditions. . . .

Which brings us to a little-noted ObamaCare statistic that is also a sign of adverse selection: the sex ratio.

One of the selling points of ObamaCare was that it was a feminist triumph. “Being a woman is no longer a pre-existing condition,” read the lead sentence of a March 2010 news story in the New York Times, whose author, Denise Grady, then explained: “That’s the new mantra, repeated triumphantly by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski and other advocates for women’s health. But what does it mean?”

What it means, in Grady’s words, is that “the new health care law forbids sex discrimination in health insurance.” Just as no one can be denied insurance or charged more because of a pre-existing condition, a woman and a man of the same age must be charged the same premium, and their policies must cover the same conditions–including maternity care for unmarried men (and women past childbearing age).

What it also means, however, is that women, like persons with pre-existing conditions, are more expensive to insure. The ban on what is called “gender rating” drives men’s premiums up as well as women’s down. (That doesn’t mean, by the way, that women pay less under ObamaCare than before. It may be that premiums rise for both sexes but the increase is steeper for men.) It means, further, that if ObamaCare enrollees are disproportionately female–just as if they are disproportionately older–premiums will tend to go up for everybody. And lo and behold, they are: The Department of Health and Human Services reports that of the 2.2 million people who have “selected a Marketplace plan,” 54% are female.

Sounds like more work for my Foundation For Gender Equity In Health Care. Or as has been said: “Although women tend to love the notion of government control more than men do, it is women who will be told they’ll have to cut back. On treatments. And years. You know we’ve been taking more than our share.”

THE ORIGINAL WONK BLOGGER, MICKEY KAUS, is staying on Ezra Klein’s case. “Wonking or cheerleading? You make the call!”

UPDATE: ObamaCare Still in ICU. Send in a Death Panel.

BOOSTING MY BIPARTISAN CRED, OR SOMETHING: So I got this note from Dick Durbin in response to the Wall Street Journal excerpt from my book that ran last weekend. He’s not a fan of for-profit educational alternatives.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Video: Bill O’Reilly and I yell at each other about weed, Part II.

DOES THIS INSPIRE CONFIDENCE? The Hill: NSA Says It Can’t Determine If It Spied On Lawmakers.

The National Security Agency said it is lawfully unable to search its database to determine if it has swept up phone records from members of Congress or other elected officials.

NSA Director Keith Alexander said, however, nothing the agency does can be fairly described as “spying on Members of Congress” or U.S. politicians, according to a letter dated Jan. 10 and obtained by The Huffington Post.

The director said the agency could not cull its database because it can only access records that are reasonably suspected to be linked to a foreign terrorist group.

“For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search to determine if any records NSA has received under the program have included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress, other American elected officials, or any other American without that predicate,” Alexander said.

Alexander was responding to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who sent a letter to the director earlier this month asking if the agency had spied on members of Congress. Sanders had classified the collection of metadata under an NSA program — including call times, duration and phone numbers — as spying.

Sanders’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The letter reiterated that President Obama’s review group had already concluded that there was no evidence that the agency abused the program to target “domestic political activity.”

This makes sense, but in an environment where every other government agency seems to have been twisted to partisan purposes, it becomes difficult to trust anyone.

K-12 EDUCATION UPDATE: Police: Fairfax Co. schools employee charged after 1,200 stolen laptops found in home.

UH OH: Employment Law Firm: Drop American Studies Assn membership or risk Title VII liability.

PARENTING AND GENDER POLITICS: I Never Thought My Son Would Play With Guns. Missing from this piece: Any mention of a father. Still, I admire her for not trying to turn her son into a daughter.

A SHORTER VERSION OF MY USA TODAY WEB COLUMN ON HIGHER EDUCATION is in today’s print paper. That’s the trouble with print — you have to leave room for the car ads and stuff.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Watchdog Criticizes Justice Dept. Decision to Forego IRS Criminal Investigation.

SHOCKER: Idiotic “Brosurance” ads made no impact in Colorado. “Sometimes, an idea that seems stupid and crazy turns out to be a brilliant success. This is not one of those times.”

STANDING UP TO BIGOTRY: Fox News Reporter Responds to ‘Bigoted’ Slurs about His Interracial Marriage.

THE WEAPONIZED IRS: Sarah Palin:

My father, who worked multiple jobs and faithfully and honestly paid his taxes for fifty years, had never heard a word from the IRS. In 2008, his daughter was tapped to run for vice president of the United States. Since that time, he has been, in his words “horribly harassed” six times by the agency. They’ve tried to dig up something on him but he’s always operated above board.

I’d publish the name of every single IRS person I interacted with, and record all the interactions.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE ADVICE: How to “Moneyball” Your Way to a Debt-Free College Degree.

OUCH: To show support for jobless, Obama invites some over to his big white mansion.

UNLESS YOU’RE MOVING AN AWFUL LOT OF WATER, I DON’T SEE HOW YOU COULD POSSIBLY EXTRACT ENOUGH OXYGEN: Revolutionary Scuba Mask Creates Breathable Oxygen Underwater On Its Own. Also, if it’s only producing oxygen, you’re depth-limited to about 30 feet. Seems bogus to me, but I’d love to be wrong.

ON TWITTER, GREG BORGARD REFERENCES MITCH DANIELS’ Open Letter to the Purdue Community and asks “Did he read Glenn’s book?” I don’t know. But honestly, the problems are clear to any reasonably competent mind.

The book’s here, if you somehow missed it . . .

IF A TIME TRAVELER ENCOUNTERED A SMARTPHONE:

A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases.

The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky. She is also proficient at connecting seemingly random concepts, and when the traveller asks her a question like “How can God be both good and omnipotent?” she can provide complex theoretical answers.

Based on this modified Turing test, our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence. Using lingo unavailable in 1914, (it was coined later by John von Neumann) he might conclude that the human race had reached a “singularity”—a point where it had gained an intelligence beyond the understanding of the 1914 mind.

The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora. To us, she is unremarkable, but to the man she is astonishing. With our machines, we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods, though we’re remarkably blasé about that fact, like anything we’re used to.

Well, to be fair, we mostly use these godlike powers to argue with strangers and post cat gifs.

OLD AND TIRED: Death Panels are a paranoid fantasy of Sarah Palin’s.

New and hot: Death Panels are grrrreeeaaatttt! Ex-NY Times Editor Keller to Cancer Patient: ‘Going Gently’ Saves Money.

UPDATE: “Soylent Green Liberals.”

CHANGE: Leno Mocks ObamaCare Lies. Video at the link.

THINK HE’LL PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD? Politico: Poll: Chris Christie opinion unscathed.

GOOD NEWS! OBAMACARE IS WORKING! “It’s just that the plan may not have been what most people thought it was.”

THIS REMINDS ME OF A JOKE FROM LAW SCHOOL: 90 Minutes In A Sensory Deprivation Tank.

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE IS UP.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Swedish Doctors Transplant Wombs Into 9 Women. “The transplant operations did not connect the women’s uteruses to their fallopian tubes, so they are unable to get pregnant naturally. But all who received a womb have their own ovaries and can make eggs. Before the operation, they had some removed to create embryos through in-vitro fertilization. The embryos were then frozen and doctors plan to transfer them into the new wombs, allowing the women to carry their own biological children.”