That's Certainly Been My Observation

Even as President Obama reluctantly granted Americans thrown off their health plans quasi-permission to possibly keep them, he called them "the folks who, over time, I think, are going to find that the marketplaces are better." He means the ObamaCare exchanges that are replacing the private insurance market, adding that "it's important that we don't pretend that somehow that's a place worth going back to."

Easy for him to say. The reason this furor will continue even if the website is fixed is that the public is learning that ObamaCare's insurance costs more in return for worse coverage.

Mr. Obama and his liberal allies call the old plans "substandard," but he doesn't mean from the perspective of the consumers who bought them. He means people were free to choose insurance that wasn't designed to serve his social equity and income redistribution goals.

Dealing with my wife's hospital bills lately, I've been struck by how lucky I am to be handling this under the grandfathered plan than under one of the proposed plans that are available from the exchanges (at least, in theory they are available: I haven't met anyone from Georgia who has mentioned successfully signing up for one). For one thing, the hospital we just happened to be nearest was in-network -- common for the old plan, which has the kind of broad networks Blue Cross normally features, but unlikely to prove true under the new plans. Since it was emergency care, that is a significant benefit.

Second, our deductible -- though I always considered it 'catastrophic' coverage -- is less than the $12,700 that I would have to come up with under the Obamacare plans. There's an individual out of pocket limit, too.

Third, the monthly premiums are about half what the cheapest plans on the exchange purport to cost.

So if I had a plan like his, I'd have had less money in the bank (because I'd have to cover higher monthly premiums), in order to pay for a higher total bill (because of a higher deductible). Plus, my wife might have had to have been carted by ambulance goodness-knows-where to find a hospital that would accept her.

No thanks, pal. Your plans for us are not only not better, they are not acceptable.

"Death in Battle," by C. S. Lewis

A poem, mentioned in passing here, Lewis wrote about his experiences in the first world war for an audience of veterans. This is what he said to them, knowing they might understand.


"Death in Battle"

Open the gates for me,
Open the gates of the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,
In the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide sea’s breast,

Open the gates for me!

Sorely pressed have I been
And driven and hurt beyond bearing this summer day,
But the heat and the pain together suddenly fall away,
All’s cool and green.

But a moment agone,
Among men cursing in fight and toiling, blinded I fought,
But the labour passed on a sudden even as a passing thought,

And now—alone!

Ah, to be ever alone,
In flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod,
In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God,
This would atone!

I shall not see
The brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown
Into the faces of devils—yea, even as my own—
When I find thee,

O Country of Dreams!
Beyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away,
Out of the sound of battles, near to the end of day,
Full of dim woods and streams.

Pools

More unintended consequences:  some bright soul at a hospital figured out it would save the hospital money to buy qualified ACA coverage for their patients and have the hospital pay the premiums itself. After all, these are very needy sick people, just the ones Obamacare is supposed to help.  And they're in dire straits and probably can't afford the premiums.  And it would be very wrong to deny coverage to these desperate patients merely because they're already sick, right?  Why shouldn't the hospital give them money to buy health insurance, if it's cheaper than eating the uncollectible bills?

The Obama administration and insurers are up in arms about the proposal, because it will upset the balance of the risk pools, dumping all those expensive sick people in.

A little burst of honesty

Here's something you don't see every day.  The National Park Service is embarrassed about having cited an OpEd instead of scientific evidence for its statement opposing fracking.  It has requested that its comments be removed from the record.  There isn't even any weasel-talk.

News you can use

How to talk to your progressive relatives at Thanksgiving dinner:  tell them regulators are going to take away their organic kale.

Coming Soon: Ragnarok

The JORVIK Viking Center is a serious operation, so when they put out a press release calling for the end of the world, it's worth taking note.

Fortunately, they are ready with good advice on how to prepare.

‘Following a study published in 2010 that bearded men are more trustworthy than those without, we’re also looking for fantastic displays of facial hair, so that we can identify those with the potential to take us into the brave new world that is foretold to follow Ragnarok,’ said Danielle Daglan director of the JORVIK Viking Festival.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Hall, you are in luck.

(Earlier version of this post accidentally deleted, clearly another sign of the end times.)

Coincidences in the News

The Supreme Court is to consider claims that the First Amendment can't require religiously-founded companies to violate religious principles. If the First is not applicable to corporations, then religiously-founded companies will be limited to single-proprietorships or partnerships: that is to say, they will be able to be conducted only when exposed to full personal liability for losses, which is a significant economic disability. Both in terms of obtaining investors and in terms of surviving or recovering from difficult economic cycles, the effect could easily be to destroy the ability of the religious to operate in the market at any significant level without agreeing to set aside their religious principles.

The Pope has come out with a significant work that refers to the effect of financial markets on politics as "a new tyranny." It doesn't read like he is thinking of Hobby Lobby, though his remarks are on point there as well.

The Obama Administration has decided to close the embassy at the Vatican. Allegedly this is a lesson learned from Benghazi. The similarities are blindingly obvious: they are, after all, operating in a religious environment chiefly protected by mercenaries and militias. If this is how the administration connects dots, Benghazi makes a whole lot more sense.

Medicaid in the spotlight

Stories are mounting about people who are unhappy to learn that they're required to buy expensive insurance that they may not be able to afford without subsidies, and that at a low enough income they can't even ask for subsidies:  they're relegated to Medicaid whether they like it or not.  It's an uncomfortable position for people who've never intended to take a government handout.  It's especially jarring for someone with considerable life savings who simply doesn't have a great deal of current income.  As best I can understand, the recent Medicaid expansion doesn't require the new recipients to spend down their savings before qualifying.

Most of us probably are unaware that there is a complicated system, varying from state to state, for recovering some of the expenses of the Medicaid program from the estate of someone who received benefits after the age of 55.  I suspect this program is going to get more attention now that millions of people with savings but low income may be more or less forced into Medicaid.

Forging an Axe

Smithing is one of those things I wish I had taken up when I was younger. There may someday yet be time, and money, for such things.

The Collie Walk

Shut up, you silencer

Desperation rules the debate over the health reform policy that will lower the oceans, or whatever it was supposed to do:

“Don’t deploy the very principles of white privilege to silence a black man on the panel because you don’t want to talk about race.  So be quiet,” the hustler screamed at Lewis.

An even more puzzling complaint: the observation that young, healthy people aren't flocking to the exchanges as hoped is "very gendered."   I was hoping for some explanation, but alas.

Part of this week's Friday news dump is the decision to delay the posting of price increases for 2015 policies from October 15 to November 15, 2014.  Nothing to do with the election, of course; there's just a reasonable desire to give insurance companies more time to complete their calculations.  Suspicions to the contrary are gendered.

Quests

Everyone probably has heard by now that C.S. Lewis died 50 years ago today. Here is Michael Gerson on C.S. Lewis and myth:

Having found truth in myths, Lewis decided to produce his own -- not as pleasing distractions but as reminders that we actually inhabit a world of fantastical, eternal creatures, with noble quests to perform and stories that do not end.  And when we discover our true citizenship, he says, it comes with a "happiness ... so great that it even weakens me like a wound."

Here's Something You Don't See Everyday

In fact, you've likely never seen or heard it before: an instrument designed by Leonardo Da Vinci, constructed and played for the first time. It somehow combines the effects of a piano and a cello.

Power To The... Central Government

A writer named Richard Kim explains that it would have all been much smoother if the Federal government were in a better position to force the states to heel at command.

That seems unlikely to me, for the reason Tex was citing Warren Buffett explaining not long ago -- which, as discussed in the comments, Schumpeter himself had laid out before. The problem has to do with organizations that rise to a certain level of complexity and scale. They really can't do any better than this. It's ossification: making them bigger and stronger just makes the failures worse and more destructive.

What's With The Scare Quotes?

National Journal deploys them in a strange way.

Obama didn't say that in July 2009—or any time while the program was being debated in Congress. He couldn't. He couldn't stand up before the American public and say that the only way to achieve the program's goals was to reallocate money within the health insurance market. That there would need to be a transfer of wealth—from the young to the old, from men to women, from the healthy to the sick. That to raise the floor, you had to lower the ceiling. To do so would have handed his enemies the kind of weaponry they craved, validation that Obama was indeed some sort of "socialist" who believed in "redistribution."

Fine, but isn't the point of the article that "redistribution" is exactly what the law does? Why are we wagging our fingers over a word agreed to be a completely accurate description?

Now That's Interesting...

Not news: Scientists discover a new genus of bacteria.

News: ...so far found exclusively in NASA and European Space Agency clean-rooms thousands of miles apart.

A Temporary Victory

At least for a while, a Federal court has blocked the ACA from forcing Catholic groups to violate a basic tenet of their faith.

It's interesting that Cardinal Dolan testified, under oath and in public court, that the services in question are "evil." That's the position of the Church, to be sure, but how strange to see it said.

A Moment of Congratulations

I would like to call the attention of the Hall to four young women who have done something remarkable: they have succeeded in surviving the United States Marine Corps' enlisted School of Infantry.

We here have differing opinions about the wisdom of incorporating women into the combat arms, and certainly on another occasion we ought to talk about what the success of these four women -- part of a group of fifteen, the other eleven of whom did not make it -- might mean in the context of that debate. Not today, though.

Today, I just want to take a moment to celebrate the heart and self-discipline it took to volunteer and to succeed against such odds. Well done!

UPDATE: Apparently that number has been reduced to three, because of a leg injury sustained in the final stages of testing by one of the women. Reportedly the fourth will be allowed to graduate with a later company.

Cryptocurrency and rebellion

A old science fiction story posited a country in which the country's chief executive had a free hand in almost every way, with one curb:  three anonymous citizens controlled a radio link to a bomb in his head.  If they unanimously agreed he was screwing up:  a sudden, dramatic impeachment.  Now a self-described cryptoanarchist is setting up something similar with a crowd-sourced bitcoin-financed website that he calls the Kickstarter of political assassinations.

The long view

George W. Bush on Leno:

“You have to believe in what you’re doing, first and foremost,” Bush said. “I relied upon my faith, my family helped a lot, and I had a good team around me, and did the best I could do. I’m also very comfortable with the fact that it’s going to take a while for history to judge whether the decisions I made are consequential or not and therefore, I’m not too worried about it, which I read some biographies of Washington, my attitude is if they are still writing about biographies of the first guy, the 43rd guy doesn’t need to worry about it.”