A Big, Steaming Pile of Obamacare Schadenfreude

The big news in Obamacare Schadenfreude continues to the be the CBO study which purported to show that Obamacare would end up costing something like the equivalent of (and that equivocation is significant) of more than 2 million jobs.  That left Obamacare opponents crying foul at the smell of the steaming mass of crap, and proponents combing through it for edible morsels.

Reihan Salam at NRO explains how Obamacare will probably widen (the now vanishing) gender wage gap:  Obamacare and the Gender Gap

Could it be that the Affordable Care Act will actually widen the gender gap? President Obama has described the raw wage gap between women and men as a serious problem that public policy ought to solve. As we have discussed, however, the raw wage gap isn’t necessarily the most useful summary statistic for understanding how women and men far in the U.S. labor market, as it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. For an apples-to-apples comparison, we would want to compare the wages of women and men who are full-time, full-year employees who work similar hours and have similar experience. Such a comparison will yield a much smaller wage gap, in large part because women are more likely than men to reduce their work hours in order to meet family responsibilities.
. . .
When the CBO found that Obamacare would reduce work effort in 2010, many of the law’s defenders argued, reasonably enough, that the fact that it would reduce was not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if it meant that people who were only working to retain their health insurance were now free to make other choices, i.e., if income effects dominated substitution effects. Unfortunately, it is a safe bet that both income effects and substitution effects will be an important part of the story, and these effects won’t impact labor force participation by women and men equally.
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The Pew Research Center reports that mothers are the sole or primary breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households with children. One-fourth of these households are headed by single-mothers; 15 percent of these households are households in which a mother earns more than a father. This leaves 60 percent of households with children in which a father earns more than a mother, and as a general rule, second earners already face high effective marginal tax rates. The Affordable Care Act will tend to increase marginal tax rates on second earners, as the value of health insurance subsidies is tied to household income.

But why say it in words, when you can use a graph: That Is A Lot Of ObamaCare Losers

Wow. Glenn nails it: YOU DON’T WANT TO BE WAGE SLAVES, DO YOU? AND WHAT MAKES WAGE SLAVES? WAGES! AllahP is insightful as usual, and Groucho is funny as usual.
And let's note that this is the average result (mean? median?) within each decile. From the summary:

OK, just a few words. Near perfect redistributionism. Nick the upper 80% a little so you can dump relatively large benefits on the lowest 20%. And hit the middle hardest because that's where the money is and the political savvy and power isn't.

Democrats are basically going all in the with the story that paying people not to work (in the form of subsidizing their health care) will "free them" to pursue their goals.  Democrats on Obamacare jobs decline: It reduces ‘job lock’

"Yesterday, the CBO projected that by 2021 the Affordable Care Act will enable more than 2 million workers to escape 'job-lock' – the situation where workers remain tied to employers for access to health insurance benefits," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) office said in a news release... "In addition to being just plain wrong on the facts of the CBO report, the GOP seems to have forgotten that ending 'job-lock' has been an avowed Republican goal for years – even a highlight in the Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential race."

House Budget Committee Ranking Member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) also mentioned the concept of "job lock" on Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)has used it too.

White House Spokesman: 'Freedom' Is Just A Buzzword

So, those things about freeing the slaves and ending the holocaust were just overblown reactions to a buzzword?

Reacting to a report that says Obamacare will lower work hours because it lowers the hourly threshold an American must work in order to obtain health care, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called "freedom" a "buzzword" on Tuesday.

"It's not anything but an added choice that they have that allows them more freedom, to use a certain buzzword, more choice," he said.

A cut in hours will force give people the freedom to choose whether to work harder for Obamacare or starve to death:

Kris Kristofferson was wrong. Freedom's just really another word for giving more to the Federal government. Time for a musical interlude:



Glen Kessler, the usually reliable Obama apologist fact checker for the Washington Posts insists that you can't say that, based on the CBO study, 2 million jobs will be lost:

Here we go again. During the 2012 campaign, The Fact Checker had to repeatedly explain that the Congressional Budget Office never said that the Affordable Care Act “killed” 800,000 jobs by 2021. Now, the CBO has released an updated estimate, nearly the triple the size of the earlier one: 2.3 million in 2021.
The inevitable tweets arrived...

Ah yes, in tweets, a medium where expression is deliberately limited to 140 characters (I can't even clear my voice with 140 characters) conservatives are required to cover all the nuances in a bazillion page equivocation filled report from an ass-covering bureaucracy.

Finally, we should note that the figures (2 million, etc.) are shorthand for full-time equivalent workers — a combination of two conclusions: fewer people looking for work and some people choosing to work fewer hours. The CBO added those two things and produced a hard number, but it actually does not mean 2 million fewer workers. (This is also off a base of more than 160 million people, meaning the number of fewer workers is a relatively small percentage of the overall pie.)

In fact, no one really knows what percentage will leave the work force entirely and what percentage will shift to part-time work, making it difficult to predict how this will shake out in the end.
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Once again, we award Three Pinocchios to anyone who deliberately gets this wrong.

I expect his to judge administration excuses as harshly.  Oh, who am I kidding?

Here's Proof: the Obama Administration Doesn't Care Whether You Work Or Not

 . . .Perhaps when President Obama’s acolytes and mouthpieces frame joblessness as liberation they’re thinking of some future Jobses and Wozniaks, freed from hourly drudgery to retreat to the garage and change the world with their brilliance. Or maybe he has in mind a J.K. Rowling, living off welfare and dreaming up a boy wizard while doodling in cafes.

Such thinking is consistent with the elite character of the Obama administration — some 40 percent of the president’s men and women hold Ivy League degrees, with more of them receiving degrees from Oxford than from any American public school. When they shrug off jobs as limitations, Obama and Co. have in mind their gifted and talented friends.

This is magical thinking. Most people are not entrepreneurs, geniuses or novelists. Most people don’t have big ideas. Most people get by and advance in small steps, not giant leaps. Jobs are the principal way people improve themselves, their lives and the lives of their families, and leave their children better off than they were.

The White House response to the CBO report is in direct opposition to its supposed stance on inequality and class mobility. More long-term unemployment, even the unemployment of people who leave the workforce willingly in order to “pursue their dreams,” in the Oprah Winfrey-style phrasing of Jay Carney, means more people stuck on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. . .

They really don't care whether you work or not, as long as you reliably vote for democrats for the subsidized poverty you find yourself in.

But enough of the CBO report.  How about the insurance bailout:

The latest Republican attack on Obamacare is powerful and simple: “no insurer bailouts.”

But never fear, Democrats are ready with a response: “Well, that’s not really what it is. The provision in question is actually called ‘risk corridors,’ which is a mechanism for compensating health insurers in case their actual costs are at least 3 percent higher than their projected costs. But it’s only temporary, until they get better data on who their customers are. And if their costs are lower than they expected, they actually pay the government. And besides … ”

You see the problem.

The last thing Democrats want to do, with a law as complicated and full of moving parts as the Affordable Care Act, is explain what the law actually does.

You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it, and we'll still do our damnedest to conceal the bad parts.

The administration is considering new Obamacare rules to "improve access" (meaning widen the networks), but which will likely raise already unreasonable rates and deductibles: New Obamacare rules seek to improve access, but could raise premiums

In a Tuesday letter to health insurers, CMS proposed a new set of rules to govern the plans to be offered through federal health exchanges for the 2015 benefit year.

The proposed rules would require insurers to submit a list of providers offered on each of their plans, and CMS would review the list to make sure that the plans provide “reasonable access” to hospitals, mental health providers, oncologists and primary care services.

Asleep yet? No? Try this.

Asked about the effect that the proposed rules could have on premiums in 2015, a spokesman for insurance lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, Robert Zirkelbach, emailed: “We are reviewing the specific requirements in the letter and will be submitting formal comments. But anytime you add new benefit requirements or impose new regulations it adds to the cost of coverage.”

Meanwhile Maryland and Oregon continue their battle to be the worst of the Obamacare websites:

Maryland lawmakers to resume inquiries into troubled health exchange

Members of Maryland’s House of Delegates on Wednesday said they plan to forge ahead with questioning the leaders of the state’s troubled health insurance exchange, even though days earlier a high-ranking state senator said the General Assembly was largely done with its inquiries.

Last week’s announcement that lawmakers would defer most questions to a regularly scheduled state audit, which would probably start in the summer and could take a year, sparked anger from Republicans and some Democrats who want a full accounting now. Some accused lawmakers of trying to protect Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown (D), who was tasked with implementing President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in Maryland, as he runs for governor.

So what's up in Portlandia Oregon?

New Cover Oregon allegations: 'If it's true, someone's going to prison'

You already know the process that led to the failed rollout of the Cover Oregon website was bad.

But was it criminally bad?

Former Republican state Rep. Patrick Sheehan told the KATU Investigators he has gone to the FBI with allegations that Cover Oregon project managers initiated the design of dummy web pages to convince the federal government the project was further along than it actually was.

If Sheehan’s allegations are true, those managers could face time in jail for fraud.
"One of the allegations that was made was so alarming that it went way beyond a legislative oversight committee and so I did reach out and contact the FBI,” Sheehan said.

A real possibility of jail time trumps an investigation being pushed by the minority.  Advantage Oregon.

We now have our first allegation that a man's personal information was stolen from the Obamacare database and used for advertising: Man’s personal info stolen after using Obamacare website

A Virginia man’s personal information has been stolen after he signed up for Obamacare on the healthcare.gov website. Now, he’s questioning if the website is the reason why.

“There’s a possibility someone got my personal information from your website,” Virginia Beach resident Rich Guillory said in a video shot by WVEC-VA while speaking on the phone. “They knew my name and they had my number” — along with his address and social security number as well.

Certainly not conclusive evidence, but since the administration has been touting it's claim that no one's personal information has been compromised (while steadfastly refusing to check), it bears watching.

Overall, Obamacare is still polling badly with the American public:

For the most part, Americans haven’t seen much impact, with 64% saying that the law has had no effect – down slightly from 69% in December. Another 19% say that it has hurt their families, which combine up for 83%, or about the level of people who already had insurance (85% in 2009). Only 13% say the law has helped their families, which is up four points from December’s 9%, but that shift is in the margin of error for the survey, too. Only 24% believe it will help their families “in the long run,” with 37% believing it will be a net negative. Those aren’t numbers that point to a big rebound in confidence for ObamaCare, or the politicians who pushed it.

It's working just the way it was supposed to!