A New Wave of Obamacare Schadenfreude?

Just when you think the tide has receded, the tsunami rebuilds:

I'm sure it's a coincidence, the IRS would never target conservatives would they? Producer of anti-Obamacare movie ‘Sick and Sicker’ hit with IRS audit

The producer of a new movie that criticizes Obamacare has reportedly become the latest prominent conservative slapped with an IRS audit. Logan Clements, producer of “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” announced via press release Tuesday that he is being audited for the first time ever.

“I had never been audited before I made this movie,” he says in a YouTube video. “There seems to be a pattern here.”

The news comes one month after the conservative Breitbart News announced that it, too, was being audited and that the action was probably politically motivated.

In the video, he says the IRS is demanding a “ridiculously long list” of documents, including “a detailed description of all transactions related to all prior year returns and supporting documentation.”

In tangentially related IRS non-obamacare schadenfreude, have you see Lois Lerner trying to invade a neighbors house to avoid the questioning of Jason Matera regarding her targetting conservatives?  I don't normally approve of such journalistic tactics, but after her obvious targeting of conservatives, her avoiding congressional oversight, and her releasing conservative IRS files to friendly liberal NGOs, I think she should be confronted at all possible opportunities.

Is Obamacare A Real-World Success In Year One?

Progressives are nothing if not relentless. From President Obama to pundits like Vox’s Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, the Left has been busy marking the first anniversary of the disastrous Obamacare rollout with claims the program has been a real-world success. Indeed, Klein (perhaps in a bid for traffic) tweaked conservative media outlets from focusing on bad news and missing the forest for the trees. At HotAir (one of Klein’s targets), Guy Benson quickly filed a link-heavy rebuttal addressing many of Klein’s claims and raising other problems with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Here at The Federalist, John Davidson wrote a response that focused on the degree to which Obamacare is not particularly increasing the quality of care, while hiding the program’s future costs. However, it may yet be useful to take a targeted look at the claims of success Klein and Cohn have made for Obamacare’s success. . .

Hot Air summarizes:

In sum, after its first full year, Obamacare has cost more and enrolled fewer than originally predicted. It has enrolled millions in a broken, ineffective program. It has interfered with people’s established medical relationships. People using the program tend to have more negative reviews than positive ones. Its few cost controls are widely believed by experts to be unsustainable. Perhaps these reasons, and not the existence of conservative media, are the real obstacles to Progressives’ efforts to declare Obamacare a success.

Why so many uninsured passed on Obamacare. It’s still the economy, stupid.

For those who were fortunate enough to still have jobs with health benefits (and who got to keep them, as promised) or those who earned so little that they qualified for mostly subsidized Obamacare, they won’t see much of an effect. But by the latest estimates there are still roughly 41 million Americans without insurance who did not enroll in the government plan who are about to pay a stiff penalty to Uncle Sam. Why is that?

This is a question which was of particular interest to me because I know some folks in this situation personally. Are they just so woefully uninformed that they didn’t know about the new law? Are they such haters of Barack Obama that they are willing to incur a significant fine at tax time to spite him? No and no. For most, as with the people profiled in this report from Yahoo Finance, they earned “too much” money for subsidies but just couldn’t afford the unsubsidized premiums.

“I was excited to finally have an opportunity to have insurance,” [Marta Hardy] says. “Then I checked [the marketplace] and I found that the lowest tier Bronze plan was going to run me $725 per month, plus a $6,300 annual deductible. That is a house payment or two car payments for me.”

Hardy decided not to sign up. Come tax time, she, like most people who decided to forgo insurance in 2014, will have to pay for that decision. The penalty this year is 1% of gross annual income or $95 per adult (whichever is greater), plus $47.50 per child.

The report goes on to say that roughly one third of the uninsured cited the cost of the Obamacare plans as the number one reason they had no insurance. Marsha Danley, also featured in the article, makes $68K annually and did not qualify for any subsidy. The premiums would have been $500 per month with a $5K deductible. She might have been able to manage it, but was already $20K in debt with medical bills for her mother which she was paying off. It just made more sense to cough up the $680 at tax time than try to find $6,000 she didn’t have for the Obamacare premiums.

The Affordable Care Act and the New Economics of Part-Time Work

Much of the ACA’s tax effect resembles unemployment insurance: both encourage layoffs and discourage people from returning to work. The ACA’s overall impact on employment, however, will arguably be larger than that of any single piece of legislation since World War II.

• The ACA’s employment taxes create strong incentives to work less. The health subsidies’ structure will put millions in a position in which working part time (29 hours or fewer, as defined by the ACA) will yield more disposable income than working their normal full-time schedule.
• The reduction in weekly employment due to these ACA disincentives is estimated to be about 3 percent, or about 4 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers. This is the aggregate result of the law’s employment disincentives, and is nearly double the impact most recently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.
• Nearly half of American workers will be affected by at least one of the ACA’s employment taxes—and this does not account for the indirect effect on others as the labor market adjusts.
• The ACA will push more women than men into part-time work. Because a greater percentage of women work just above 30 hours per week, it is women who will be more likely to drop to part-time work as defined by the ACA.

If the idea was to make more people dependent on the government, though, it's working.

Of course, one of the great arguments liberal present is that public healthcare is just too big and too important to trust to the private sector.  Then why is Firestone (yes the tire company) succeeding against Ebola in Africa where the governments are failing?

Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola In Its Tracks

When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation in Harbel, Liberia.

Harbel is a company town not far from the capital city of Monrovia. It was named in 1926 after the founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Harvey and his wife, Idabelle. Today, Firestone workers and their families make up a community of 80,000 people across the plantation.

Firestone detected its first Ebola case on March 30, when an employee's wife arrived from northern Liberia. She'd been caring for a disease-stricken woman and was herself diagnosed with the disease. Since then Firestone has done a remarkable job of keeping the virus at bay. It built its own treatment center and set up a comprehensive response that's managed to quickly stop transmission. Dr. Brendan Flannery, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's team in Liberia, has hailed Firestone's efforts as resourceful, innovative and effective.

Currently the only Ebola cases on the sprawling, 185-square-mile plantation are in patients who come from neighboring towns. . .