Obamacare Schadenfreude in a Brown Paper Bag

Walmart health plan is cheaper, offers more coverage than Obamacare

New Obamacare health insurance enrollees may feel a pang of envy when they eye the coverage plans offered by Walmart to its employees.

For many years, the giant discount retailer has been the target of unions and liberal activists who have harshly criticized the company's health care plans, calling them “notorious for failing to provide health benefits” and "substandard.”

But a Washington Examiner comparison of the two health insurance programs found that Walmart's plan is more affordable and provides significantly better access to high-quality medical care than Obamacare.

Of course, it was made in China, not Washington D.C.

Miraculous: White House Credits ObamaCare, Which Went into Effect January 1, for Slow Growth in Healthcare Spending Since 2010

We will give them credit for having amazingly huge balls to claim something like this. It’s so totally, brazenly preposterous, but they do have the stones, don’t they? Obviously the idea is to rewrite history and say how awful everything was BO–Before ObamaCare. That was this colossal clusterfuck unwinding before our eyes won’t see all that bad. Right?

The White House on Monday said ObamaCare was partly responsible for slowing the growth of healthcare spending, even while the agency tasked with implementing the law said the impact was “minimal.”

“For years, healthcare costs in America skyrocketed, with brutal consequences for our country,” President Obama’s healthcare adviser Jeanne Lambrew wrote in a blog post.

“The Affordable Care Act, for the first time in decades, has helped to stop that trend,” she said.

The White House claim came Monday afternoon in conjunction with a report issued by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) that found healthcare spending over the last four years has grown at the slowest pace ever recorded.

And, of course, CMS is so credible these days, especially after that smooth healthcare.gov rollout. Oof. OK, let’s take them at their word then. If growth slowed from 2010, wouldn’t this logically tell us then that since costs were trending downward, why the need for ObamaCare to begin with?

Sadly, one can hardly overestimate the ability of stupid people to be fooled by arguments like this.

Another take on the statement, with actual data:

Just over a month ago, the White House was declaring victory in Obamacare’s war against rising medical costs, asserting that the average annual increase in health expenditures between 2010 and 2013 has been significantly lower than the long-term average. (See their chart on page 4 here.)

At the time, John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis posted a chart (now slightly out of date) showing that the entire decline, in nominal dollars, had occurred before Obamacare was signed. Now, here’s my up-to-date version of Goodman’s chart, with data taken from the new annual report released this week by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

So, following the administration's logic, whoever was in office in 2002 caused the health care inflation rate to drop like a stone, until whoever was in office in 2009 caused it to stop declining, and even cause a small increase in 2012.

Megan McArdle takes on Pelosi's contention that Obamacare will "free" people to go into into the arts, or even (heaven forfend) start small businesses:

Will Obamacare Inspire Small-Business Ownership? 

...I have a natural affinity for this sort of argument. The core argument of my new book, "The Up Side of Down," is that failure and risk-taking are a necessary part of success -- and that the best way to be a more successful person, or a more successful society, is to minimize the cost of failure. Not to eliminate that cost: Failure should hurt, because that’s what discourages us from doing things that don’t work. But the pain should be short and sharp, not catastrophic. Societies that help people minimize catastrophic downside risks are societies that maximize their growth potential.

That said, social insurance has costs as well as benefits. I could tell you a completely plausible story in which Obamacare unleashes a wave of entrepreneurial energy. I could also tell you a completely plausible one in which young people who might have started a business are deterred by the additional cost of the health-care mandate. Or one in which a 50-year-old displaced worker, with the knowledge that he’ll now be able to get cheap health insurance, chooses early retirement over the uncertainty and strain of trying to start his own business. Or one in which the increase in insurance premiums that many unsubsidized people experienced causes a budding entrepreneur to throw up his hands and go back to a corporate job. Thought experiments like this tend to tell us a lot more about our priors -- and what we want to believe -- than about reality...

Ace's Kaboom cereal must have had some kick yesterday, as he wrote a scathing  post on the Obamacare lies, and how the left is now "revealing" their long sought single-payer coverage after the Obamacare rollout has proved to be such a debacle.

The Left's Lies on Obamacare and Everything Else

Charles C. W. Cooke has a good column on the left confessing its lies about Obamacare... now that it's too late for the public to make an informed decision, prospectively, on the law.

It is easier, they say, and "they" are always right, to beg forgiveness afterwards than to secure permission beforehand.
. . .
I've noticed this in a different context, recently-- these "noble lies" the left tells.

The Left believes in many things that the majority of society does not. They believe, for example, that Socialism is an ideal to be aspired to. But rather than admit this, and make a case forthrightly for Socialism, they (and here I include their zealous advocates of the media) simply deny that any move towards Socialism is Socialism at all.

In the case of Obamacare, the Right was correct, and true: Obamacare was a massive cost-shifting, wealth-redistributing scheme. And also effectively a "government takeover" of health care.

The Left believes these things are good. They do not think it's fair that a healthy person purchasing insurance before he gets sick should pay less than an unhealthy person who delays its purchase until after he has been stricken. And they do not like how the free market operates in the health insurance market -- or, actually, how it operates in any market at all. They are foursquare in favor of government takeovers of not just the health insurance industry but practically any industry.

Oh, they would not call it this. They would call it a "Government-Business Partnership," or some such rot.

But the point stands: They are in favor of these things, but rather than honestly state their beliefs and press for the rightness of them, they instead lie at practically every turn and simply say "We do not believe that" and "We do not wish that" or "That is not what you claim it is."

This is why no genuine discussion can be had with them. They lie at virtually every turn. One can hardly argue with a man that what he believes is false if he automatically gainsays believing in it at all.

Meanwhile. HHS and Obama continue to play Calvinball with the law:

HHS 'Corrects' Obamacare Rule, Waives Comment Period and 30-Day Delay
On New Year's Eve day, a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule correction was entered in the Federal Register related to an Affordable Care Act rule that had been finalized two months earlier.  The published version of the rule entitled (in part) ‘‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; Program Integrity," subpart M (‘‘Oversight and Program Integrity Standards for State Exchanges’’), failed to include a cross-reference to the small business health options program (SHOP) Exchanges section of the regulations. This "technical nonconformity" meant that SHOP's were not subject to the new rule. Since HHS believed the intent of the original rule was clear, the correction was made without the usual comment period and 30-day delay before the rule would take effect in 2014.

I don't really pretend to understand this, but it is simply another example of how thoughtlessly the law was written and enforced, and how lawlessly it's being implemented.

Are There Any Parts of Obamacare the President Can't Suspend?

In the past year, President Obama has unilaterally suspended various parts of the Affordable Care Act whenever it's been politically convenient to do so...

All of the delays have led critics of the law to ask some obvious questions: If the Obama administration can suspend the individual mandate for people who had their plans canceled, couldn't the next president suspend the mandate for everyone? Better yet, couldn't the next president suspend the entire law?

These are simple questions, but leading Democrats don't have any answers.

"I've seen the administration's argument as to why they have the authority to make those changes, and I don't challenge that," Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Tuesday in the Capitol building. But the senator pleaded ignorance when asked if the president could suspend the rest of the law.
. . .
Scholarly expertise was of no help to Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a former state attorney general, who was similarly unable to answer the question:

TWS: Are there any delays the president wouldn't have the authority to make? I mean, could the president potentially suspend the entire law if he wanted to?

BLUMENTHAL: I can't answer a hypothetical. . .

The Connecticut senator's voice trailed off as the doors closed on the senators-only elevator.

Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that he doesn't "know of any legal impediment" preventing the executive branch from delaying the employer or individual mandates...

But couldn't a future president suspend the entire law? "I don't want to speculate what a future president might do," Casey replied.

If a Republican wins the presidency in 2016, Democrats won't need to waste much time speculating about what he will try to do to Obamacare. But they will need to come up with some arguments about why it's illegal.

Clearly, they aren't planning much beyond the next election, if even that. They're simply counting on The GOP’s Grandfather Weapon
the difficulty in repealing a new entitlement.  However, a novel approach to the castration of Obamacare comes from a sometimes liberal, but always thoughtful Mickey Kaus:

It may be true, as the New York Times hopefully declared, that “[o]nce a benefit has been bestowed, it is nearly impossible to take it away” (though there are a million or so Americans who’ve been receiving long-term unemployment benefits who might want to argue the point). But there’s a traditional political solution to this Take Away Problem, namely the “grandfather clause.”

It wouldn’t be hard for Republican repealers to write a law that got rid of Obamacare while somehow keeping those few million who’ve signed up on some form of similar insurance. “If you like your Obamacare you can keep your Obamacare.” Exchange policies could be converted to non-exchange policies in a special, no-new-enrollments program, for example. Over time, attrition would whittle this grandfathered class down to trivial size–a process with which you’d think Obamacare’s architects would be familiar.

Sort of like the rubber bands they tie around the testicles of baby rams and bulls to deprive them of blood and cause them to wither and drop off.  Of, course, according to Mike Rowe, of "Dirty Jobs" fame, this is more debilitating than simple cutting them off with a sharp knife, and biting down on the cut to seal it...