Freezing Cold Obamacare Schadenfreude

Dang, it's cold today.

Obamacare: The Real Pain Starts This Year - Ready for increased costs and decreased access to care?

Obamacare was designed such that its most harmful provisions would not be implemented until after the President had been returned to office for a second term and his Democrat accomplices had been reelected to their congressional seats. Fortunately for the nation, the latter part of that strategy was a spectacular failure. Nonetheless, it did provide the public with a temporary reprieve from the health care law’s most painful exactions. That brief respite is now at an end. This year, you will begin to experience the realities of “reform” first hand and you are not going to like how it feels.

In fact, you are probably already feeling the first twinges without recognizing that their source is Obamacare. If you are among the 150 million Americans who get health insurance through their employers, for example, chances are that the coverage your company offered for 2015 has much higher premiums than did last year’s plan. The President and his toad eaters in the legacy media will do their best to convince you that these increases are caused by insurance company avarice, but this is merely another lie they are peddling in the hope that they can save Obama’s “signature domestic achievement.”

The actual cause was the looming employer mandate and other Obamacare regulations that took effect January 1. The mandate and accompanying red tape dramatically increase the cost of employee health insurance for companies with 100 or more full-time-equivalent workers. It requires all such firms to offer “minimum essential” coverage to 70 percent of their full-time employees or pay huge fines. These PPACA-mandated benefits are expensive, and very few small-to-medium sized employers can unilaterally absorb the costs of such “essential” coverage. So you get to share the pain.

But your premiums are just the start. . .

No, The GOP Doesn’t Have To ‘Replace’ ObamaCare - You don’t have to replace bad ideas, you just have to get rid of them.

. . . ObamaCare may well survive King v. Burwell, the legal challenge that could sink ACA by forcing the administration to follow the law and cut subsidies from government “marketplaces” in states that didn’t surrender to White House inducements. Only 13 states have their own marketplaces. If it doesn’t, though, Republicans will have a glorious chance to deregulate and open up markets. You know, fix our broken health care system. If notBurwell, they’ll have other shots at it. The chance of ObamaCare’s popularity growing over the next few years is slim. Most of the painful taxes were designed to be implemented during Obama’s second term, once the law had already turned into a giant welfare program that would be almost impossible to dislodge. (That’s what they mean when they say “it’s working.”)

As a matter of politics, and good policy, there is no reason for the GOP to surrender to the formulation offered by Democrats. Today’s conversation dictates that federal policy should be replaced by other federal policy—or, preferably, more federal policy. But in reality there’s no one clamoring for more giant reforms, and there’s no reason for Republicans to offer any.

“Dad, I have cancer”

Obamacare is going to kill you. Or one of your kids. Or one of your parents. Someone in your family is going to die from Obamacare. You can bet on it. You can bet your life on it.

There are many things in medicine that are in a state of flux because of Obamacare. Obamacare is the name given to the most inappropriately termed “Affordable Care Act.” There is nothing about Obamacare that makes care affordable. Obamacare has made care much more unaffordable. What it has done is make healthcare appear to be affordable because of subsidized premiums. The problem is that liberals – and especially democrat voters- do not comprehend that coverage is not the same thing as care. People are forgoing medical care because they cannot afford the large deductibles needed to keep premiums at even marginally affordable rates. Deductibles are especially high for seniors.

Obamacare Tax Watch: What to Watch For

This WSJ piece reminded me about the subsidy disaster (and they didn’t mention the cliff):

The first year of the Affordable Care Act is in the books, and now comes a tricky tax-filing season for millions of Americans.
The law’s requirement that most Americans carry health insurance means all filers must indicate on federal tax forms whether they had coverage last year and got tax credits to help pay for it. Those who didn’t have coverage could face a fine, although reduced staffing at the Internal Revenue Service and certain changes to the law mean the so-called individual mandate is expected to be lightly enforced this year, tax preparers say.

Translation: there is going to be a shitload of tax fraud perpetrated this year. Primarily by people claiming to have had coverage, when they didn’t.

When said simple lie will save you hundreds to thousands in tax pain, you better believe people will check the box “YES”.

I honestly don't think they'll try to discourage tax fraud in Obamacare this year. They don't want to discourage the product of addiction. There's plenty of time later to crack down.

Found at Wombat-socho's "LIVE AT FIVE: 01.07.15" Megan McArdles take on the Harvard professors whining about Obamacare

. . . they persist in our mass delusion: that there is some magic pot of money in the health-care system, which can be painlessly tapped to provide universal coverage without dislocating any of the generous arrangements that insured people currently enjoy. Just as there are no leprechauns, there is no free money at the end of the rainbow; there are patients demanding services, and health-care workers making comfortable livings, who have built their financial lives around the expectation that those incomes will continue. Until we shed this delusion, you can expect a lot of ranting and raving about the hard truths of the real world.

Progressives: Stop laughing at Harvard - No thanks.

But it’s so much fun! After the New York Times provided conservatives with a schadenfreude feast about Harvard elites bemoaning their own ObamaCare petard, the scolds on the Left came out in force in an attempt to shame conservatives into giggles rather than guffaws. Jonathan Chait argued that the Right didn’t appear to realize they were laughing at their own solutions:

What makes this response funny, if not unusual, is that the reforms currently roiling the Harvard faculty are moderate versions of the reforms conservatives themselves not only have championed but continue to champion. …
But of course the conservative objection to Obamacare isn’t that its silver plan, covering 70 percent of health-care costs, is too skimpy. The objection is just the opposite. Conservatives hate, or claim to hate, Obamacare because its benefits are too generous. They propose instead to replace the law with far skimpier benefits, so that healthy individuals can enjoy the low premiums that come with bare-bones plans covering fewer claims and offering less protection. They don’t think the 70 percent of costs covered in the Obamacare exchanges is too low. They think it’s too high.

Well, yes and no … but mostly no. Conservatives wanted to restore pricing signals, it’s true — as did Harvard’s faculty, about which more later — but not coercively, and certainly not with a universal mandate to buy comprehensive health coverage. The conservative solutions to pricing signals were to incentivize the use of health-savings accounts, move the industry to hospitalization coverage, and encourage the growth of retail-care clinics for routine care on a competitive fee basis. That would have protected people against serious illness while alleviating costs for both insurers and providers. It also would have reduced prices by eliminating insurance overhead on most routine care and forcing providers to compete on price. That works in the Lasik and plastic-surgery markets, neither of which usually deals with insurance, and both of which have seen prices controlled through market forces without government interventions and mandates.
. . .
The problem with ObamaCare is that it both hikes deductibles and premiums and most of the other costs, without really doing much about pricing signals at all. . .