Category Archives: The State

Subsidies for People Who Once Paid Their Way

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.”

Sisters Love Uncle Sam

Elections, Feminism, Gender, Socialism, The State

It’s true. “Sisters love the state.” From “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam”:

Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, dates the statism of American women to the 1980s, a function of “Ronald Reagan’s assertive foreign policy,” but also of the female affinity for bigger government. Kohut confirms that, “Then, as now, women [have] tended to favor a larger role for government programs than do men.”
John Derbyshire traces remarks about the ladies’ lack of proclivity for liberty to 391 B.C.
“That was the year Aristophanes staged his play ‘The Assemblywomen,'” Derbyshire documents in “We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.” “In the play, the women of Athens, disguised as men, take over the assembly and vote themselves into power. Once in charge, they institute a program of pure socialism.”

George Orwell, whose insights into these matters were very deep, also noticed this. He has Winston Smith, the protagonist of ‘1984,’ observe: ‘It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of orthodoxy’ (p. 88).

Having lived in communist China “in the years just after Mao,” Derbyshire seconds Orwell. “If you wanted to hear … utterly unreflective parroting of the Party line, a woman was always your best bet.”

Libertarians like to imagine that their constituency is differently derived than that of the Republicans. However, the fantasy that women flock to liberty is just that, a fantasy. I’ve attended those libertarian gatherings in which, after “subtracting the dragged-along wives and girlfriends from these events, the normal male-female ratio of the remainder is around ten to one.” …

At RedState.com, John Hayward updates his readers on the blight that is “the single woman society,” with reference to the race in Virginia:

The Virginia governor’s race was yet another example of the massive voting gap in a huge demographic: single people, particularly single women. According to exit polls, Republican Ken Cuccinelli won handily on the “hard” issues facing Virginia voters, and won most other demographic slices, but Democrat Terry McAuliffe won big with single people, crushing Cuccinelli by nearly fifty points among single women.
A similar dynamic could be observed in the 2012 presidential race, where the Obama campaign made a very concerted effort to win over single women
…The single female demographic doesn’t get hung up on details. Another of the new liberal icons, Wendy Davis of Texas, couldn’t answer basic questions about the abortion legislation she opposed with a purportedly heroic filibuster. Now she’s claiming she is actually kinda sorta “pro life” when you think about it. This is true of all the emotional appeals directed at single female society – lack of knowledge is not only overshadowed by passionate conviction, it can be a point of pride. Critics who dwell on the fine print are portrayed as somehow dishonest, using tricksy legalistic nitpicks to injure great idealistic crusades. The liberal hero of the hour cares so very, very much that they cannot be bothered to learn what anything costs, or explore the ramifications of the laws they champion….
… That’s another thing about the single female society: it’s not just a matter of dependents voting to preserve or increase their personal benefits. They are highly receptive to the notion of government-managed compassion, fearful of the cold terrors of the predatory wasteland that lies beyond the comforting light of Mother Government’s home fire, even when they personally are not much affected by particular policies.

MORE.

While you’re at it, revisit “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam” in its entirety.

UPDATED: GOV.CON Is Working As Intended

Communism, Economy, Government, Healthcare, Socialism, The State

Delay it, fix it, tweak it, get Amazon’s computer programers to redesign it; and, boohoo, the poor president—a pox on Obama!—is so poorly served by it!

Republicans and Democrats alike have made these specious, irrelevant, mealy-mouthed points about the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” That includes those “pig-ignorant panelists” who turn the Sean Hannity Show into such a zoo. (My apologies to all animals, who are far and away superior in intelligence and manners to Sean’s panelists.)

You can no more mend Government.Con than you could have tweaked Stalin’s Gulag.

Read “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” at the preeminent libertarian site, Economic Policy Journal:

…In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off. “We don’t have profits and losses in the civil service. Success in the civil service is measured by the size of our staff and budget. A bigger department is more successful than a smaller one,” smiled the marvelously sardonic Sir Humphrey Appleby, superstar of the satire “Yes, Prime Minister.”
Since it “manages” money not its own, government has no real incentive to conserve resources, ensure a job is properly done, or deliver on its promises. Entrusted with the administration of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of people you don’t know and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your on-the-job performance mirrors that of the government? …

MORE.

UPDATE: “Some health insurance gets pricier as Obamacare rolls,” concedes the LA Times. But what would an LA Times article be without floating a foolish theory, blaming business for a law that has mandated extended coverage?

Guaranteed, exhaustive coverage is driving up rates:

Individual policies must also cover a higher percentage of overall medical costs and include 10 “essential health benefits,” such as prescription drugs and mental health services. The aim is to fill gaps in coverage and provide consumers more peace of mind. But those expanded benefits have to be paid for with higher premiums.

Justice demands that people who scoffed at the right analysis (see “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured,” August 7, 2009) of this law and cheered it on should suffer. They deserve to suffer. But I fear the future for all. Be afraid.

Eurocrats Award Themselves A Peace Prize

EU, Government, The State, UN

They sure use up all the oxygen in the world, don’t they? A glorified governmental committee awards a close ally of the United Nations with a prize for its “efforts” to do a job it was entrusted to do. Wow!

The Norwegian Nobel Committee (appointed by the Norwegian Parliament) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Arguably, the OPCW is an arm of the UN. Via Wikipedia:

The organisation is not an agency of the United Nations, but cooperates both on policy and practical issues. On 7 September 2000 the OPCW and the United Nations signed a cooperation agreement outlining how they were to coordinate their activities.[13] The inspectors furthermore travel on United Nations Laissez-Passer in which a sticker is placed explaining their position, and privileges and immunities.[14] The United Nations Regional Groups also operate at the OPCW to govern the rotations on the Executive Council and provide informal discussion platform.

The OPCW received the award for its “efforts to eliminate chemical weapons,” and for “trying to destroy Syria’s stockpiles of nerve gas and other poisonous agents.”

The always unintelligible U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon—does anyone English-speaking understand this man’s mixed metaphors?—approved, of course. Perhaps he will win next year?

“Like the United Nations, the mission of the OPCW was born from a fundamental abhorrence at the atrocities of war,” he said. “Together, we must ensure that the fog of war will never again be composed of poison gas.”

The evil European Union, “which endeavors to herd Europeans by stealth into a supranational European State,” “won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for uniting a continent ravaged by two world wars and divided by the Cold War.”

Uniting? As was observed in “Adieu to the Evil EU,” “[a]dding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”

The name of Malala Yousafzai, “the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban last October for advocating education for girls,” had been floated as another candidate. She is certainly courageous. But she’s a pacifist, venturing recently that if a Taliban attacked her, it would be wrong to defend herself with a shoe, because that would be stooping to his level. Come again?