"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Politics is Boring

I haven't been blogging much the past few days due to the press of work and also, frankly, because what's going on politically is like watching a very slow-motion train wreck.   I have no doubt, as my many prior posts on the subject would confirm, that Obamacare will be a disaster for the country that will end up turning into a massive new entitlement program at best, a catastrophe of society-destroying magnitude at the worst.   But it will happen so slowly, so incrementally, that many of our low-information voters won't notice.   Losing one's freedom is like boiling a lobster, if you're the lobster.   You don't notice it until it's probably too late to climb back out of the pot.

Anyway, over at Ace of Spades this morning they had a pretty good list of the issues to date of Obamacare.   Pretty much any of these are a debacle, together they're a death spiral:

Let's review. Obamacare's problems: 
(1) The website is broken. 
(2) The payment and accounting and administration back-end is unwritten, untested, and out of time. 
(3) They are seriously out of time to do something about those 3.5 to 5 million people whose insurance has been cancelled. To be covered by Jan 1, they have to get a new plan by Dec 15, which means 140,000 to 200,000 of them need to be enrolling every day between now and then, including weekends and the Thangsfrickingiving holiday, which ain't gonna happen ya'll.  
(4) Adverse selection a.k.a. the death spiral a.k.a. the shit spiral is coming. See Ace's post last night on the Kentucky exchange's obvious precursor to the shit spiral.  
(5) Next year we get to do this same song and dance with the group plans as the employer mandate kicks in. 
(6) Lawsuits. There are some nontrivial lawsuits pending including the contraception mandate challenges and the suits based on the fact that the statute doesn't actually allow HHS to offer subsidies on the federal exchange or impose the employer mandate on states that didn't implement their own exchanges. 
(7) There are still 40 million uninsured Americans according to President Obama. Which seems to me to be just a bit of a failure of the aims of Obamacare.  
[8] The plans on the exchanges likely will not let people keep the provider networks of doctors, hospitals and specialists they currently use, making continuity of care impossible. [Andy] 
[9] Obamacare appears to be nothing more that an enormous expansion of Medicaid, the worst-performing health program in the country. [Andy] 
What am I missing.

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