Gray Sunday Morning Obamacare Shadenfreude

Another so-so weather day here in Slower Maryland.  Temperatures hovering slight freezing, gray skies, wind rising from the south. Not even a football game on to watch, so I'll have to settle for the Olympics.  Will she fall or not?

A rather unsatisfactory wad of Obamacare Schadenfreude too, gray and wonkish, except maybe for:
Smitty's Three Realizations About ObamaCare

From Is Obamacare Unraveling?

. . .the administration was thinking of extending the individual health insurance policies that Obamacare was supposed to have cancelled for as much as three more years. . . .with the literal drop dead date for these old policies hitting by December 31, 2014, that would have meant those final cancellation letters would have had to go out about election day 2014. That would have meant that the administration was going to have to live through the cancelled policy nightmare all over again––but this time on election day. The health insurance plans hate the idea of another three-year reprieve. They have been counting on the relatively healthy block of prior business pouring into the new Obamacare exchanges to help stabilize the rates as lots of previously uninsured and sicker people come flooding in. . . .

Which brings me to the following:

1. Hayek wins. Again.
2. The insurance companies may have thought they were dealing with the pleasant Cthulhu, but the insurers are as much on the menu as the rubes who gave this no-talent rodeo clown a pass last November.
3. The GOP is as much at fault for all of this idiocy, insofar as it plays the Progressive game, and doesn’t offer substantial reform that redistributes power, not wealth.

The Economist Who Exposed ObamaCare

In September, two weeks before the Affordable Care Act was due to launch, President Obama declared that "there's no serious evidence that the law . . . is holding back economic growth." As for repealing ObamaCare, he added, "That's not an agenda for economic growth. You're not going to meet an economist who says that that's a number-one priority in terms of boosting growth and jobs in this country—at least not a serious economist."

Much like the Preznit clings to the 97% consensus myth with regards to the most catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.  He doesn't really believe it, but it's a great number to throw out to cow the sheep.

. . .Mr. Mulligan is responsible for the still-raging furor over the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion that ObamaCare will, in fact, harm growth and jobs.

Rarely are political tempers so raw over an 11-page appendix to a dense budget projection for the next decade. But then the CBO—Congress's official fiscal scorekeeper, widely revered by Democrats and Republicans alike as the gold standard of economic analysis—reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work before ObamaCare will work less or not at all as a result of ObamaCare.

As the CBO admits, that's a "substantially larger" and "considerably higher" subtraction to the labor force than the mere 800,000 the budget office estimated in 2010. The overall level of labor will fall by 1.5% to 2% over the decade, the CBO figures.

Mr. Mulligan's empirical research puts the best estimate of the contraction at 3%. The CBO still has some of the economics wrong, he said in a phone interview Thursday, "but, boy, it's a lot better to be off by a factor of two than a factor of six."
. . .
So amid the current wave of liberal ObamaCare denial about these realities, how did Mr. Mulligan end up conducting such "unconventional" research?

"Unconventional?" he asks with more than a little disbelief. "It's not unconventional at all. The critique I get is that it's not complicated enough."

Well, then how come the CBO's adoption of his insights is causing such a ruckus?
"I would phrase the question a little differently," Mr. Mulligan responds, "which is: Why didn't conventional economic analysis make its way to Washington? Why was I the only delivery boy? Why wasn't there a laundry list?" The charitable explanation, he says, is that there was "a general lack of awareness" and economists simply didn't realize everything that government was doing to undermine incentives for work. "You have to dig into it and see it," he explains. "The Affordable Care Act's not going to come and shake you out of your bed and say, 'Look what's in me.' "

Judging by their reaction to the CBO report, the less charitable explanation is that liberals would have preferred that the public never found out.

Is Obamacare Unraveling?

Laszewski argues the administration's desire to constantly put off bad news means the policy is unraveling piecemeal.

This might be one of those you can't win for los'en moments for the administration. Stay on the cancellation track and make lots of people mad one more time on election-day or grant another three-year reprieve and make the people you forced to buy the new plan wonder why they can't have the policy their neighbor across the street has.

When the President last October called on health plans and insurance commissioners to defer the cancellations for one more year, was it the beginning of the unraveling of all of the stringent individual health insurance market requirements in Obamacare? Would this new change to defer these cancellations for another three years just be step number two in that process?

Remember, back when this change was announced, Ezra Klein called it the "first crack in the individual mandate." He also said that if it led to a further delays it would be "a very big problem for the law." Lazewski actually disagrees that the policy is in danger. Thanks to risk corridors and reinsurance, the policy will continue one way or another, at least until Obama leaves office. The real problem is political. It's possible the President will decide to leave the uproar associated with implementing his own health care mandate to his successor rather than add it to his own troubles.

He also predicts that the next shoe to fall will be the failure of many "enrollees" to actually pay for plans and get dropped.

Speaking of troubles, there is more news in Laszewski's post. He says the final percentage of people who will see their plans cancelled for non-payment is going to be close to 20 percent. There have been suggestions this was the case but now the books are closed. That means (as I said here) many more people are going to be dropped from the official HHS count than enrolled in October and November combined. We heard a lot about the "November surge" a few months ago, but relatively little about the void rate which turns out to be much larger.
. . .
But don't expect to see HHS update the numbers to reflect reality any time soon. Why? Because the portion of the website which allows HHS to delete someone has not been built. That should give the administration all the excuse it needs to keep putting out inflated paid plan enrollment numbers to match their inflated Medicaid enrollment numbers.

Even the LA Times, a relentlessly liberal rag (we used it to wrap garbage when I was a teen), is noticing the flaws in the California version of Obamacare:

Conservatives have been warning about the limited networks and fewer healthcare options that insurers were bound to use as a way to help control costs since before the law’s passage; some of the law’s cheerleaders finally caught on just a tad bit later; and now that the law has gone into effect, Americans are living it. And if organizing just the signup process through the website was such a shame spiral of royal bureaucratic incompetence on so many fronts, you know that trying to administer the actual healthcare system through it is going to be just as bad — as California also aptly showcased today. Again via the LA Times:

Admitting it gave some consumers bad information, California’s health insurance exchange pulled its physician directory for having too many errors.
Covered California made the move late Thursday amid growing frustration among both consumers and doctors over inaccurate information about insurance networks in the state marketplace.
The exchange yanked its online directory of medical providers in mid-October after acknowledging there were serious problems then with the data. It published an updated list in November. …
The exchange said Thursday that “while the combined provider directory was a useful service for many consumers, some enrollees located physicians thought to be in their plan, and subsequently discovered they were not.”

The state suggested that enrollees “who are unsatisfied with their provider network still have time to cancel their coverage and sign up with a different insurer” before enrollment ends in March — but I doubt that that’s much comfort to the people for whom signing up in the first place was a tortuously drawn-out trial, or for the people who are discovering that they cannot, in fact, keep their doctor. Or, you know, “if you want to, you can pay for it.” It’s a matter of “choice,” or something.

Obamacare opportunities… for identity theft

Jillian Kay Melchior has an informative – and rather alarming – article up at National Review detailing a less discussed aspect of Obamacare which consumers should be aware of. Identity theft gets a lot of coverage in the media (think Target most recently), but I was unaware that the majority of such theft and fraud takes place in the area of medical supplies and services.

Most identity theft in the United States is medical-related, according to a recent report from the Identity Theft Resource Center. The survey was released even as certain aspects of Obamacare enrollment have raised concerns about identity theft and consumer privacy.  .  . In 2012 alone, medical identity theft increased by nearly 25 percent, affecting 1.85 million Americans, according to another recent report from the Ponemon Institute, which researches privacy issues.

Much like government, the giant health care providers have found that it's really too much trouble to try to police fraud, it's just easier to stick the giant, poorly informed payer.

But that doesn’t mean that opportunities for the “small business” individual thief are completely absent. The so called “navigators” who are supposed to help you find your way through the byzantine maze of Obamacare have access to all sorts of information which could pave the way to mischief. But they’re all trustworthy, honest individuals, right? Melchior finds that, at least in California, that may not be such a safe assumption either.

At least 43 convicted criminals are working as Obamacare navigators in California, including three individuals with records of significant financial crimes. . . . Limited statistics released by Covered California — the state’s new health-insurance exchange — showed that one navigator has repeat forgery offenses — one in 1982, then another in 1994, with a burglary in between. Another had two forgery convictions in 1988, in addition to a domestic-violence charge a decade later. Another committed welfare fraud in 1999 and had shoplifted on at least two prior occasions. Since 2000, individuals now working as navigators have committed crimes including child abuse, battery, petty theft, and evading a police officer. At least seven navigators have multiple convictions.

Comforting, isn't it?

Perhaps Californians should consider themselves lucky that their navigators are required to submit to background checks at all — there is no such requirement in the ACA itself, and in as many as 31 states, no screening is mandated.

Edward Snowden passed his background check...

Aetna still talking about pulling out of the Obamacare market.

There is so much uncertainty about Obamacare that Aetna, the U.S.’s third-largest insurance provider, may be forced to double its rates or opt out of the program, the company’s CEO, Mark Bertolini, told CNBC on Thursday.

What action Aetna will take is still up in the air, but the company doesn’t plan to set its 2015 Obamacare rates until May 15. Between now and then, though, Bertolini said he’s trying to get the necessary information from the Obama administration to properly price its insurance products.

“I think in the end analysis, pulling out is always the last resort,” Bertolini told “Closing Bell.”

“We don’t like to do that because we disenfranchise customers and we disappoint customers, so we always look at that as a last resort, but that is an option that we will pursue if we need to if the program doesn’t settle down; if we can’t get a good handle on the data and the less data we have, the more risk premium we need to put into our products and that means the prices are higher.”