Home » Obamacare: Big Dig of government programs?

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Obamacare: Big Dig of government programs? — 16 Comments

  1. One of the simple tenets that allowed the unblinkered to predict higher premiums for Obamacare was the principle of adverse selection. In private health care, group plans, which must accept new employees regardless of medical condition or history, have a higher incidence of claims because the have a higher proportion of people who actively need and use their medical insurance. People who can’t get health insurance privately have no choice but a group plan. Although often subsidized by an employer, the premiums for group plans are naturally higher than private insurance where relatively healthy subscribers are charged lower rates.

    Obamacare is the ultimate group plan. Accepting any and all pre-existing conditions naturally drives the cost of care higher (reality always wins)

    The Obamacare site seems to be using this principle of adverse selection precisely in reverse; i.e., since the premiums will be higher than current pricing we will do everything to hide the pricing from potential subscribers so as not to frighten them away. I offer the label “adverse enticement;” enticing people who don’t need your product and who can get it cheaper, even if they want it, to purchase your more expensive policy filled with options that they really don’t need.

    Of course, if Humana, Aetna or Blue Cross/Blue Shield did this (hide pricing to entice unsuspecting consumers) their corporate ass would be instantly hauled into court by the anti-business leftists who are the very ones responsible for this duplistic Obamacare system.

    And the l govt gets away with imposing precisely the kind of hardcore Darwinian capitalism that proponents of big govt constantly accuse the private sector of implementing. More projection from the left. Quelle surprise!!

  2. You knew you were being lied to from the get go when you were told 30 million more people would receive medical care and it would cost less. I can only conclude democrats can’t do math of they are pathological liars.

  3. The thing is, they need people who are not subsidized to sign up as well. Those people will face awful prices . . . why would they sign up?

  4. Here we see the arrogance of the central planners. Always, there will be political considerations that make the system less efficient.
    They were hoping the corruption would be outweighed by some sort of “economies of scale.”
    …at least, those who wanted to do right by the poor. The others were only interested in furthering their own power.

  5. It would have been cheaper to just give free care to those 30 million uninsured. What’s scary is that much more money has been spent on Obamacare marketing than on their failed “Big Dig” style website.

    We’ll have to remember these millions and billions misspent (or misplaced, like $64 million of the IRS-Obamacare “slush fund”) when they inevitably start telling certain segments of the population that we just can’t afford their care, that hard decision have to be made when the funds are limited.

  6. “It would have been cheaper to just give free care to those 30 million uninsured.”

    Agreed, but that would not have allowed Ocare to shine a flashlight on your or my rectum.

  7. “And to be fair, the government may also have feared that if people saw the unsubsidized prices first..”

    To be fair Nancy would have known what was in it before it was signed into law/implemented. The demented clowns in DC don’t need no stinking ‘fair’.

  8. “It would have been cheaper to just give free care to those 30 million uninsured.”

    A FB friend claimed that Obamacare is revenue neutral. I can’t believe that. However, Google tends to put pro leftist arguments higher in their search results – can anyone suggest a good place to get the real scoop?

  9. Folks, I keep telling everyone, I WAS able to get through to the NY State Exchange (2:30 am, Oct. 1), and they DON’T HAVE TO COVER PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS — not for the Bronze and Silver tiers!

    And they DON’T SUBSIDIZE the working class/lower middle class people — you can make TOO LITTLE to qualify for the “subsidies.” That’s right — TOO LITTLE to qualify for subsidies.

    Yet make, at the same time, TOO MUCH FOR MEDICAID.

    Sorry for the all caps, but I’ve been frustrated beyond belief: I feel like I’m shouting into the whirlwind! No one can believe me, not even my Republican friends.

    You see, the Left has LIED ABOUT IT ALL again! And, being honest and honorable folk, we find it grotesque and difficult to believe that the Left are such amazing liars, so utterly brazen.

    So ask yourselves: what is the purpose of this denial of subsidies to the lower middle class and working & genteel poor?

    I have a theory: (1) The Leftists want everyone on the govt. teat, right? But so far, the bourgeoisie, whom all of them from Marx and Lenin on down have wanted to Eradicate, have been notoriously resistant to getting on the dole of any kind.
    (2) The bourgeoisie will be getting subsidies that, in terms of need, should go to poorer folk. So they’re getting the govt. “crack,” just a little taste. . . .
    (3) The Leftists have played all sorts of sordid games to disguise the true cost of even this “short-sheeted” version of Govt. Hellcare — taxing us for FOUR YEARS before doling out any cheese, e.g. All to keep the “price tag” under the magic number of $1 Trillion.
    (4) It’s a calculated risk, not covering the genteel poor comme moi, because they figure that most of us will vote for Them anyway, and those of us who hate them are too powerless and moneyless to do anything much about it except bitch, moan, and die.

    Thoughts? Any of you manage to get behind the Curtain and see what’s back there in other states?

    One more thing: for all you boycotters, in NY State at least, “non-grandfathered plans” will cost DOUBLE YOUR CURRENT PREMIUM when you try (or are forced to) enroll.

  10. Sadness is a good emotional resource to turn into determination, relentlessness, and hate.

    All of which are useful in war. Sadness, not so much.

  11. I’m not really sure how this decision (to force signup before showing any plan info) really played into the debacle that is healthcare.gov, since if they’d built it the other way, it still would have blown up when users tried to actually sign in, because apparently the signup process is fundamentally broken. So, we would have had a situation where people might have been able to see the pre-subsidy prices for insurance, and then failed to be able to actually sign up for any insurance. I.e., it would have been just as broken.

    The problem with healthcare.gov is, apparently, that it was built by too many contractors, building little bits and pieces, without any one contractor being responsible for systems integration. Instead, HHS was supposed to do it, which is a boneheaded move if I’ve ever heard of it. Government doesn’t have the expertise or personnel to pull off something like this, for obvious reasons. They should have delegated this to the private sector and given the entire responsibility to tech companies that know what they are doing. That’s what California did, and their health care exchange site is working just fine.

    The reason they didn’t do it? Washington’s procurement process is Byzantine and it would have been illegal to do it the right way. So, they did it in the messy, ultimately incompetent way.

    Government, especially the Federal government, isn’t very good at this sort of thing. It’s wasteful and inefficient. They’ll work it out but it is too bad that so many states opted not to build their own exchanges — those are the states that are suffering through this debacle the most.

  12. Not really, Ymarkasar. The irony is the tech companies that ran the Obama campaign’s web presence are SUPER competent. They pulled off an incredibly efficient, totally on the ball operation that was the wonder of both 2008 and 2012. But NONE of them were involved in healthcare.gov, and they said why: procurement rules. Working on a campaign they didn’t have to deal with DC red tape, but working on healthcare.gov there was tons of DC red tape. So, they didn’t even try to apply for those jobs — the work went, instead, to old-line government contracting companies with much less tech savvy.

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