Some Fresh Obamacare Schadenfreude

A warm, foggy morning here; I had intended to take off early to go fish, but the wind came up as it got light; maybe it will slack later.

From the Department of "Whoda Thunk?" Gallup survey suggests sign-ups under ObamaCare not as high as White House says

The massive survey, released on Monday, shows the number of uninsured indeed has fallen to its lowest level in years, likely thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index measured the share of adults without health insurance. That shrank from 17.1 percent at the end of last year to 15.6 percent for the first three months of 2014.

The decline of 1.5 percentage points would translate roughly to more than 3.5 million people gaining coverage.

But the numbers, released a week after the close of the health law's first enrollment season, also suggest a far more modest impact on coverage than statistics cited by the Obama administration.

The administration says 7.1 million have signed up for subsidized private plans through new insurance markets, while 3 million previously uninsured people gained coverage through the law's Medicaid expansion.

Why the huge difference? For starters, the administration's numbers include people who switched or were dropped from their previous coverage, as well as people who have not paid their first month's premium, and who would therefore still be uninsured. . . 

Pretty much all the factors we've been whining about for months.  And I would add, the increase in coverage probably reflects a fair amount of people becoming re-insured at work as the economy, however slowly struggles it's way out of the Obama depression.

This brings the fraction of uninsured people down to above any in the Bush era.

Just how popular is Obamacare among its target audience, young people without jobs likely to provide health insurance? Not very:



Obamacare Kills New Jersey's Plan for Low Cost Health Care for Needy Children:

While the federal government was trumpeting the benefits of Obamacare to boost enrollment earlier this year, about 1,800 families in New Jersey were receiving letters telling them their children would be losing their health coverage last week.

The Affordable Care Act — the federal law that mandates everyone have insurance — effectively killed FamilyCare Advantage, a low-cost option for kids in New Jersey created six years ago for parents who earned too much to qualify for Medicaid and other subsidized programs but too little to buy on a policy on their own. The state program was the first of its kind in the nation.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey was the only insurance carrier that agreed to offer the FamilyCare Advantage plan, which covered most medical, dental and vision needs for the relative bargain of $144 a month per child.

But it didn’t offer mental health treatment and several other services Obamacare requires, and that was the fatal flaw, said Sen. Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex), who sponsored the law creating the program.

Vitale said he tried for several months to broker a deal between Horizon and the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but neither side could agree on how to make it affordable and legal. The program ended last week.

Americans on Medicaid Exceed Population of UK

The number of Americans who were enrolled in Medicaid at any time during fiscal 2013 exceeded the entire population of the United Kingdom, according to new data published by the federal government’s Medicaid and CHIP Payment Access Commission (MACPAC).

Were Medicaid a nation instead of a U.S. entitlement program it would be the 20th most populous country on earth.

Which, shockingly, is better than I feared.

The Road to Progressive Dhimmitude

In the recent Hobby Lobby Case, Justices Elana Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said that corporations that don’t want to pay for abortions should simply not provide any health insurance: “But isn’t there another choice nobody talks about, which is paying the tax, which is a lot less than a penalty and a lot less than — than the cost of health insurance at all?” Dissenters from the official line must pay a tax. That sounds familiar.

Muslim lands used to practice Dhimmitude–the practice of allowing non-Muslims who subscribed to other “Abrahamic” faiths, to practice their religion freely, provided they pay a tax. For most of the centuries since Muhammed, Jews have been, as a rule, better off in Muslim lands, compared with Christian lands. But that does not mean Muslims treated Jews (or Christians) as equals. Recall that Moses Maimonides, one of the great Rabbis of the “golden age” of Medieval Islam, had to flee Islamic prosecution. Dhimmitude reflected the idea that non-Muslim monotheists were allowed to live in Muslim lands (note that term), provided they paid a tax as a badge of inferiority and, implicitly, submission. America was, is, supposed to be different, and not just for Jews.
. . .
In previous ages, of course, America had a much smaller state, and fewer regulations. That’s the other side of the story. Were there no health care mandate, then, presumably, the owners of Hobby Lobby would be free to buy whatever form of insurance they choose. And the owners of Hobby Lobby, being religious, may believe it is their duty to provide health insurance for their employees. That may be inseparable, to them, from closing on Sundays.

The hyper-regulatory state, which Obamacare exemplifies, rejects such an approach. If they don’t like it, they can pay the tax. Justice Kagan noted that the tendency of Hobby Lobby’s argument is to break up the uniformity of national health insurance regulations: “everything would be piecemeal. Nothing would be uniform.” The spirit or health care reform (and I use the term “spirit” advisedly ) is one of uniformity rather than one that allows for diversity. . . 

Liberals will hasten to tell you, that diversity means whatever they want it to mean that you're free to think like them, and do what they want you to.

Pelosi: We’re keeping the employer mandate no matter what Gibbs’ clients want

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested Sunday that former top Obama aide Robert Gibbs’s comment that the employer mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act won’t survive might be related to Gibbs’s business interests.
“I don’t know who his clients are or what his perspective is,” Pelosi told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But we are celebrating the fact that we have over seven million who have signed up.” …
Asked again about Gibbs on Sunday, Pelosi expressed exasperation that his comments would be given such prominence. “I don’t know why we’re focusing on that,” she told CNN. “One person says one thing. Seven million people signed up.”

Yikes. I imagine that Gibbs won’t be too thrilled to have Pelosi imply that he’s a corporate shill. However, Pelosi seems a lot more effusive about the employer mandate than the Obama administration, perhaps because Gibbs and the White House sees what’s coming when it really hits. HHS’ own data shows that as many as 93 million may lose their current insurance plans, and given what compliance costs will be for larger employers, a significant percentage of those may find themselves on the individual market as employers choose to pay fines rather than absorb the skyrocketing costs.

Yes, as Jimmy Fallon pointed out, 7 million "signed up" after 5 million people got their insurance cancelled and 300 million were told to get insurance or pay the dhimi tax.  And yes, the world looks slightly different when you move from government employment to private employment.  Pelosi should try it.

Team Boehner to Drudge: We didn't 'expand' Obamacare, we repealed a piece

. . ."Successfully repealing this Obamacare provision is just one part of Republicans' larger effort to repeal the full law and replace it with better solutions focused on lowering health care costs for families and small businesses," Boehner aide Kevin Smith wrote in the blog post.

The AP report linked by Drudge cut the other way by saying that "Democrats describe the change involving small-business coverage options as a straightforward improvement of the type they are eager to make, and Obama signed it into law."

Smith emphasized that "repealing this provision will give employers more flexibility over the type of health care options they can offer their employees, and will expand the use of high-deductible plans paired with health savings accounts."

Small steps.  You have to break up a piece of concrete before you haul it to the dump.