A Tall Glass of Cold Obamacare Schadenfreude

We dodged a weather bullet last night. Winter Storm Nikka passed by last night leaving freezing rain, ice and snow to our north.  However, even as the temperature this morning was 31.5 F, the rain is a least mostly liquid.  No ice on the roads or walkways.  We have a little ice on some trees and bushes, but not enough to make them pretty.

The big news in Obamacare Schadenfreude today, of course, is that yesterday the "totally non-biased" Congressional Budget Office released a report that says that Obamacare will will reduce jobs by the equivalent of about 2.5 million full time jobs.

Failure Is Not a Public-Relations Problem: The Brutal Economics of ObamaCare

The Congressional Budget Office report about the economic impact of ObamaCare is out, and it paints an ugly picture. The Hill:

The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.5 million jobs and contributing to a $1 trillion increase in projected deficits, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released Tuesday.

The Washington Post:

The Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by more than 2 million in coming years, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday in the most detailed analysis of the law’s impact on jobs.

ObamaCare is a disaster in pretty much exactly the same ways that Republican opponents of the bill predicted four years ago, although it’s also been a disaster in ways that even its harshest opponents did not predict. The problem for Obama, Democrats and their media allies is that they have treated the failure of ObamaCare as a matter of public-relations, as if the reality of failure could be concealed by a P.R. blitz claiming that it was actually a success.

Curiously, the predominant mechanism proposed for this job loss (there are several) is not that employers will cut back on hours or jobs, but that people covered by Obamacare receiving subsidies will voluntarily cut back on their own time, and not be replaced in the workforce!

Despite claims from Obamacare critics about the law's potential effects on hiring, CBO said the expected drop in work hours between 2017 and 2024 would result largely from worker decisions not to participate in the labor force, rather than from higher unemployment or the inability of part-time workers to find full-time hours.

Whodda thunk, pay people to do nothing, and that's what they do!

Of course, such predictions are done by economic modelers (all models are wrong, some models are useful) and should be regarded as predictions written on a stormy beach at low tide.

Faced with a truckload of lemons, Democrats tried to make a truckload of yellow fluid out the news:

In a statement and conference call featuring top administration officials, the White House tried to beat back an emerging narrative that the CBO report supported claims made by health care reform critics. The CBO report says the Affordable Care Act could lead to a reduction of 2 million full-time workers between 2017 and 2024. The CBO says the reduction would not come via fewer available full-time jobs (as critics of the law have alleged) but “almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply.”…

“To put that in context, I have no doubt that if we eliminated Social Security and eliminated Medicare, there would be many 95-year-olds that would choose to work more hours than they’re working today just so they could survive, feed themselves and have health insurance,” the official said.

The CBO’s projected reduction in full-time workers, then, “shouldn’t be a significant cause for surprise and it reflects the fact that workers have a new set of options and are making the best choices that they can choose to make for themselves given those options,” the official said.

Don’t act surprised, either. Nancy told you this was coming. Look on the bright side: If fewer people working is a sign of economic success, the Obama presidency will be remembered as a golden age.

Even usually reliable democratic shills like the Washington Post's Dana Millbank (cursed be his name) weren't buying this piss.

This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November. This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage workand become an ungainly entitlement. Disputing Republicans’ charges is much easier than refuting the federal government’s official scorekeepers.

White House officials rushed to dispute the referee’s call — arguing, somewhat contradictorily, that the finding was both flawed and really good news if interpreted properly.
. . .
But there’s only so much White House officials could do. Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it.

I could fill pages with citations and quotes from from this event alone, but I think I'll stop there.  What else have we got today?

Less than half of doctors in nation’s largest cities are accepting Medicaid now: study

Health-care consulting firm Merritt Hawkins conducted a survey of Medicaid acceptance rates which found that just 45.7 percent of physicians are now accepting Medicaid patients in the U.S.’s largest 15 cities. The federal welfare program cuts costs by reimbursing physicians at extremely low rates, preventing many doctors from seeing patients with Medicaid coverage.

leading Forbes magazine to ask:  When Will The Government Start Forcing Doctors To See Obamacare Patients?

Could Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius use regulations or financial incentives to get physicians to participate? As one example, Obamacare included $230 million to increase the number of medical residents, as well as physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Those or future grants could come with Obamacare-participation strings attached.

States could also play a role in forced participation. States license physicians and oversee insurance contracts. Many Democratically controlled states are just as invested in the success of Obamacare as the president. Thus a blue-state governor and state legislature could mandate all of the state’s doctors accept Obamacare as a condition of practicing in the state, or require doctors accepting private insurance to accept Obamacare coverage also. It may be the only way to ensure Obama’s promise that if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor—or at least “some doctor.”

Invoking this medical nuclear option would surely exacerbate the doctor-shortage problem, as those unwilling to be shackled by the government retire or perhaps try to switch to a cash-only basis. But HHS and the states are already gearing up to fill some of that gap with physician assistants and nurse practitioners.

Let's see how well this is working in California, the leader in all things progresssive: Obamacare enrollees hit snags at doctor's offices

Aliso Viejo resident Danielle Nelson said Anthem Blue Cross promised half a dozen times that her oncologists would be covered under her new policy. She was diagnosed last year with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and discovered a suspicious lump near her jaw in early January.

But when she went to her oncologist's office, she promptly encountered a bright orange sign saying that Covered California plans are not accepted.

"I'm a complete fan of the Affordable Care Act, but now I can't sleep at night," Nelson said. "I can't imagine this is how President Obama wanted it to happen."

Does God Obama mark a sparrow's fall?

By way of Wombat-Socho's Live at 5 yesterday (it needs to be on your reading list), Megan McArdle criticizes the "science" (using the word loosely) behind testing the effectiveness of Obamacare:

. . .the Innovation Center has so far mostly undertaken demonstration projects; about 40 of them are now underway. Those projects test an idea, like a new payment system that might encourage better medical care -- with all of a study’s participants, and then rely on mathematical modeling to judge the results.

This is fantastically disappointing. The whole point of a randomized controlled trial is that it’s the best way to know whether something is working. That’s why we use them to determine what drugs are safe, and not a demonstration project in which we give everyone the drug, then see if they look unusually sick.

The administration’s approach, by contrast, is excessively prone to the perils of the promising pilot program: The effect you think you’re picking up can too easily be spurious, and even if it isn’t spurious, you can’t necessarily scale it. Of course, that’s also potentially true of a randomized controlled trial; something that really does work well in a small group may be a disaster in a large one. . .

This is kind of a wonkish article, but if you're interested in how research interfaces with policy, you should read it.  These people make a difference in your lives (for good and ill), even if you don't see it.

Does Obamacare encourage women to stay in abusive marriages?  One democrat thinks so:

Under current enrollment policies, victims who have left abusive relationships, even if they file taxes separately from a spouse, still are judged on total household income of the marriage. So if a victim flees and is trying to obtain health insurance coverage, she or he may actually be scraping by on a substantially smaller income yet not qualify for subsidies — and be mandated to buy a costly policy.

And a high healthcare premium would exacerbate what is already a trepidatious financial situation, with many victims coming from a marriage where the abusive spouse controlled the money and many of the abused eventually returning to the marriage because of an inability to financially support oneself and any children.

Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) wrote Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Acting Administrator Marilyn Tavenner on Friday after it was brought to his attention “that some of these victims are facing unique barriers to qualifying for lower monthly premium payments as they search for and purchase health care coverage.”

When will democrats end their war on women?

Today's final word goes to Andy at Ace's:

Rosie Scenario Has Left the Building: CBO Nearly Triples Estimate of Work Hours Lost Due to Obamacare

Say it with me ... UNEXPECTEDLY!

[CBO cited] new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger than-expected reduction in working hours - eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021 versus a previous estimate of an 800,000 decline.

If only someone could've cut through this manure beforehand, but we had to pass the law to find out what was in it. Or so I'm told.