Saving Daylight for Obamacare Schadenfreude

The first day of Daylight Savings Time.  Can better weather be far behind?  Surprisingly, another almost perfectly average early Spring day in here in Southern Maryland.  Partly cloudy, 40 ish, strong Northwest wind. So, now, about that Obamacare Schadenfreude?

From the Department of "You Can't Fool All the People All the Time" department, Labor Unions are beginning to figure out that Obamacare wasn't designed to help people who work for a living:

A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very “income equality”President Obama says he is campaigning to fix.

“Only in Washington could asking the bottom of the middle class to finance health care for the poorest families be seen as reducing inequality,” said the report from Unite Here. “Without smart fixes, the ACA threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage,” said the report, titled, “The Irony of Obamacare: Making Inequality Worse.”

Based on government and private reports, polling and statements from administration officials, the report, to be sent to pro-union members in Congress, charges that low-wage workers are taking the hit under Obamacare, while wealthy insurance companies fatten up on government subsidies.

Instapundit quips "More Rubes Self-identify"

I'm sure they'll be pleased to hear that the IRS estimates cheapest Obamacare plan $20k per family in 2016

In an official document, the Internal Revenue Service, the enforcer of Obamacare’s mandates, is estimating that the cheapest Obamacare plan (the Bronze level of coverage) will cost a family of four $20,000 per year. Matt Cover of CNS News writes:

The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

Remember how it was going to "save everybody $2,500 a year" in healthcare?  That was a lie.  Just Sayin'. But remember, they lied to you so they could get the uninsured insured...

How Not to Help the Uninsured

Half of uninsured adults have looked for insurance online, according to an Urban Institute survey cited in the Washington Post. But only 10 percent of them have actually bought it, according to a different survey from McKinsey & Co. Overall, McKinsey says, just one quarter of the people who bought insurance on the exchange were previously uninsured.
The positive way to look at this is to note that the number of uninsured people who had purchased insurance increased dramatically by February:

The negative way to look at this is to note that, even so, the majority of activity in the market comes from the previously insured, who are mostly replacing prior coverage. (emphasis mine)

With one month to go, most of the uninsured still hadn't done anything. Worse, the number of previously insured people who had not enrolled in a qualified health plan by the end of February was almost twice the number of previously uninsured people who had. That's the opposite of the effect this law was supposed to have.

That's if you truly believe the law was designed to work as written instead of failing, and being used as an excuse to further the liberal "Wholly Grail" of fully socialized medicine. Or maybe their strategy is not as forward looking as I fear.  Speaking of the extension of the "non Obamacare compliant plans for small businesses well past the midterm elections: New Obamacare Strategy: Anything to Get Through the Midterms

Obama’s actions here, then, are an attempt to spread out the political reckoning over time. He wants to put off the worst parts of the ACA consumer experience until the law is more thoroughly entrenched.

There is a catch, however. When the first extension was announced, insurers expressed serious concerns about the disruption it would cause. They had already set premiums and planned for the coming year on the assumption that people would be switching plans. Changing that at the last minute threw them into chaos and threatened the integrity of the exchanges.

While this second extension seems more planned than the first, it could still lead to the same problems. But for the administration, the long-term stability of the law is apparently less important than making it through the midterms with the Democratic majority in the Senate intact.

Patrick Frey (Patterico) catches the New York Times substituting it's (and the liberals) jusdgment of what a good good health care plan is for those who actually pay:

New York Times editorial:

The Obama administration announced a new policy on Wednesday that will allow many people to renew their existing insurance policies for two more years even though the policies don’t provide the comprehensive coverage and consumer protections required by the Affordable Care Act. The move is designed to provide political cover for Democratic senators facing tough re-election campaigns in Republican-leaning states where the president is especially unpopular.
The Democrats have been hit with a barrage of attack ads from conservative political-action groups highlighting the cases of individuals who complained that they faced higher premiums when their old (less comprehensive) policies were canceled and they were forced to buy new (and better) policies on the health care exchanges established by the reform law. Now the last date for renewing the old policies has been pushed past the 2014 midterm elections, reducing the likelihood of complaints on the eve of voting.

This is a basic concept, but some people don’t get it, so I’ll repeat it. What’s “better” for me is what I choose for myself. My choice might be right and it might be wrong — but I know my circumstances better than the government, and if anyone is going to get it right (or have the opportunity to mess it up) it should be me. Not the government. Me.

Emphases Patterico's

You need to read this one carefully.  You know how much of the CIAs and NSAs budgets are "off books" so that it's more difficult for people (enemies presumably) to figure out what they're doing?  It turns out part of HHS budget under Obamacare is also "off books", although who the enemy here we're protecting it from escapes me, unless it's us....

Why won’t the White House explain how off-budget ObamaCare money got spent?

Democrats designed the ObamaCare system to mainly fund itself. The low-income subsidies come directly from taxes levied in the so-called Affordable Care Act, as well as some other spending functions. However, it became clear early on that the Obama administration miscalculated the operational costs of ObamaCare when Kathleen Sebelius began pressuring insurers to contribute to Enroll America after the non-profit hired Obama administration figure Anne Filipic to assist HHS in preparing people for the sign-up launch in October. Republicans called this an attempt to get around the Constitution by creating new lines of funding for executive-branch operations, while they also wondered exactly where HHS got its funding for other efforts in ObamaCare.

In the last bipartisan budget deal, House Republicans got an amendment that forces the White House to reveal its money transfers in HHS to explain how they found the cash. However, as Politico reports, that’s only half of the problem:

The Obama administration is dropping some new hints about how it has moved money around to fund Obamacare without Congress — but not nearly enough to put the controversy to rest.
Forced to reveal more details under a provision tucked in this year’s bipartisan budget deal, the Department of Health and Human Services declared Friday how it used Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s authority to move about $1.6 billion in departmental funds around last year — the Cabinet secretary’s version of looking for change under the couch cushions and hitting the jackpot.
But HHS didn’t say exactly how it spent the money, and it didn’t lay out the kind of detail Republicans sought. So now the Republicans will have to decide their next move, whether it’s just more records requests or new efforts to tie the Obama administration’s hands in future appropriations bills.

We already knew that Sebelius used $450 million of the Prevention and Public Health Fund to pay for Healthcare.gov, in a small bit of irony given the unhealthy status of that platform since its launch. The only thing it’s prevented is enrollments and cancellation of erroneous sign-ups. One surprise is that CMS, which runs Medicare and the federal portion of Medicaid, coughed up $268 million that just happened to be lying around in the “general program operations account.” I’ve worked for corporate units where the topline revenue number doesn’t get up to $268 million, and that’s just spare change? Sebelius also found another $300 million from HHS’ Non-Recurring Expenses Fund, which is the account where all of the unused cash from previous years gets stashed.

In other words, in just three line items, the federal government got its hands on more than one billion dollars of loose cash, used for purposes that Congress never authorized. Remember when Obama demanded an end to the “era of austerity” last week in his budget proposal?

Start cancelling parts of their budget.  If they can find $1.6 billion (with a "b") by looking in the couch cushions, we need to take away their couches.  Start with their travel and training budgets.

In an early bid to use voter data bases the way the Obama campaign used them in the last two elections, the RNC is preparing a data base of voters who have been hurt by Obamacare to use in the upcoming elections:

Republican National Committee data operatives will build a list of the millions of Americans who have lost insurance policies due to Obamacare in order to help their candidates win over these voters at the ballot box in 2014 and 2016.

"Getting that information [on plan cancellations] and having good data as to who votes, who doesn't vote, voter registration, party affiliation, consumer characteristics, cross-referenced with that kind of information, I think, is important for us to have," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told the Washington Examiner after his CPAC panel presentation Saturday morning.

It's early in the process, though, because the cancellations are still taking place. Priebus said the RNC's data goals won't be hindered by the leftward lean of many tech staffers. "We have not had a difficult time finding data scientists and software engineers," he said. "We've brought in some of the top engineers from LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Facebook that are working on these data projects that we have at the party."

While I have some issues with this on the basis of privacy, the Obama campaign let that genie out of the bottle in the last few elections. It's not going back in the bottle unilaterally.

Finally, little poem by Sarah Palin from CPAC:



I like her politics for the most part, but her voice is a bit like fingers on a chalk board.

Possibly the only benefit of the President Obama being elected is that it has quieted Sarah and her Peggy Hill voice and mannerisms. Although, to be fair, the vice Preznitcy has also slowed down that perpetual gaff machine, Joe Biden.