Category Archives: Government

Administration Hits Gov.Con’s Tiny Target. Or So It Claims.

Business, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Internet, Technology

CNN cracks me up. Reports of “continued problems with the 2010 Affordable Care Act” they call “anecdotal.” The writer also chortles that the “website deadline” has been met. The administration promised to fix Gov.Con by November 30.

Although insurance companies dispute that the fix is in—as the latest claims-making has it, the site is working for the “vast majority” of users. It is said to “now handle its original intended volume of 50,000 concurrent users.”

(“Insurers are still getting enrollment files that are duplicative and have missing or inaccurate information,” Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for health insurance industry trade association group America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a statement to CNN. “In some cases they are not getting the enrollments at all.”)

Imagine worrying whether you’ll be able to purchase an item on Amazon or eBay when you want to, because you could be the 50,001th customer. Such commercial sites handle millions upon millions of customers all at once.

The Private, Online Alternative To Gov.Con.

Government, Healthcare, Private Property, Socialism, Technology, The State

If you’re going to let the government herd you into Gov.Con., go to HealthSherpa.com to “Instantly compare premiums for health exchange plans.”

No, this simple, working site is not a government stopgap. “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” explains why a command-and-control fix will always fail.

HealthSherpa.com was designed by “three 20-somethings.”

three young men from San Francisco, George Kalogeropoulos, Ning Liang, and Michael Wasser, did what the government has not been able to do: build an easy to use site where people across the country can get quotes and compare different health care plans through the federal exchange.

A couple of kids built the site the state could not build. It took them three days. It cost a few hundred dollars, while Gov.Con. contractors have conned the taxpayer out of half a billion dollars and counting. And the Gov.Con. site will likely never quite work. (What’s the incentive to get it to work? Close to none. Read why.)

Seattle Fool Foments Violence Against Business

Business, Capitalism, Glenn Beck, Government, Political Philosophy, Socialism

“They did it. Seattle voters elected a socialist candidate to the city council,” reported The Blaze, on Nov. 15.

Seattle City Councilor Kshama Sawant has since delivered a screed tying economic freedom to all social ills. Real original, isn’t she? A true intellectual too. She’s a professional academic, what else?

We need to recognize what is at the root of racism, this hatred and fear of black people, of people of color, of poor people,” Sawant said. “The root cause of these blatantly unjust laws is the capitalist system itself … this system does not work for us. Racism is necessary for this oppressive system to exist.

Nov. 21, the socialist councilwoman “accused aerospace and defense giant Boeing on Monday of ‘economic terrorism’ and told Boeing machinists they should consider taking ‘over the factories.'”

“The workers should … shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine,” Kshama Sawant told a group of activists in the city’s Westlake Park.
Sawant’s comments were made at a rally organized by machinists after they rejected a deal that would reduce pensions for union members in return for guaranteed jobs in Everett, Wash., building 777X Boeing airliners for eight years.
Now Boeing is considering taking those jobs elsewhere.

Go ahead, Boeing. Take the leap and move major operations from “The Evergreen State” to a right-to-work state. South Carolina residents will be only too happy to work rather than wreck stuff.

Subsidies for People Who Once Paid Their Way

Government, Healthcare, The State

Once they are shoved into Obama-care “exchanges”—and they will be—the policy holders expunged from the individual health-care market will often qualify for taxpayer subsidies.

The New Republic prefers “federal subsidies” to “taxpayer subsidies.”

Semantics can help conceal who will help fund insurance for individuals who had it, paid for it in full, and were happy with both policy and price.

Meanwhile, the brainiac who brought us all this, and who was incapable of foreseeing the consequences of the law, is “brainstorming with insurers.”

The Politico title doesn’t jibe with the substance of the article, in which the president is back to preaching the benefits of Obamacare.

The latest, via McClatchy:

On Thursday, Obama announced that he’d allow – but not require – insurance companies to extend existing policies for a year as long as they notified customers that their benefits might be diminished with their current plans and that alternative policies might be available to them.

Insurance companies already have devised plans for next year, received the necessary approval from states and begun to sell policies. They aren’t required to continue to offer their existing policies and state insurance commissioners aren’t required to approve those 2013 plans.

“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents the industry.

Washington state’s insurance commissioner, Mike Kreidler, announced Thursday he won’t allow insurers to extend their policies, saying Washington’s state-based exchange was “up and running and successfully enrolling thousands of consumers.”