Higher Rates And Hussein’s Healthcare Go Hand In Hand

Debt, Healthcare, Political Economy, Reason, The State

“You know what the insurance companies are like,” I was told by a statist neighbor, who adores Obama but concedes her healthcare premiums have gone up. How does the irrational individual solve the cognitive incongruity of rising prices and her undying love of the state?

She blames markets.

But even the stupid statist press can deny no longer that “insurance is at dramatically higher rates,” and some of the reasons are these:

First, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) sets minimum standards for benefits, including mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, maternity care, prescription drugs, and rehabilitative care, which were not included in many of the old plans. Also, insurance companies are now required to take all comers, regardless of their health status, and so rates are rising to cover their costs as well.

MORE.

Here The Heritage Foundation is forced into explaining the economically obvious:

…Contrary to a key intention of the legislation, the combination of mandates and taxes will not help to reduce the deficit. In fact, the PPACA will likely increase the deficit by an average $75 billion per year, and as a result, the nation’s publicly held debt will be $753 billion higher at the end of 2020. Such astronomical debt crowds out other productive investments and will lead to an estimated 670,000 lost job opportunities per year. …
he policy combination of spending and taxes alters the macroeconomic performance of the economy and feeds back onto the budget. A dynamic simulation shows that the higher initial costs are not an investment that pays off with a higher return in later years. Indeed, these front-loaded costs slow economic growth with higher inflation and higher interest rates, which overwhelm the benefits the proposal hoped to gain in later years.
The bill’s taxes, penalties, and fees on investors and businesses will decrease the amount of investment in the economy. This reduced investment will in turn lead to a decline in productivity, causing the economy to produce $706 billion less worth of goods and services. A smaller economic pie means that workers earn lower wages and salaries. Higher taxes on investment also put upward pressure on interest rates as investors seek to achieve their after-tax desired rate of return. …
…Lower wages reduce the amount of taxable income that could otherwise have been achieved. This will both increase the deficit and grow the total debt—which in turn puts upward pressure on interest rates and crowds out some savings that could have gone to new productive business investments.
Higher interest rates mean that more American tax dollars will go toward paying the interest on the federal debt rather than paying down the principal. Simulations using dynamic analysis estimate that the government would spend an average $23 billion more per year on interest rate payments over the 2010–2020 year window than it would without the PPACA.

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And from “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists”:

The pit of perverse incentives Papa Obama is engineering includes leveling the insurance industry, which by definition must discern and discriminate between applicants based on their health status (largely under individual control). Under his benevolent rule, private insurers will be subjected to a host of new regulations, “including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk,” in the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner’s rendering.
This means one thing: moral hazard. Writes libertarian economist Walter Block: “The greater the protection from the random expenses of sickness the greater the potential over-consumption of the item in question.”
We currently labor under “a seeming patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.” Yet the fewer the intermediaries interfering with the primary, patient-doctor relationship, the better the patient’s prognosis. The president’s prescription for too little freedom, however, is even less of the same!

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Only A Sicko Trusts The State With His Health

BAB's A List, Healthcare, Political Economy

By Myron Pauli

Around age 8, I got sick and either my mom or dad had Dr. Kontorwitz walk 300 feet with his black bag to look at me. I have no idea how the bill was paid and what was a PPO or HMO or HAS or Exchange or Cafeteria Plan – and someone else (my parents) had to figure it all out. At age 20, dad was dead and my mom moved away and I was without insurance (between college and grad school), when I last saw Kontorwitz for a 2nd degree burn on my foot – just me and the doctor – no accountants – and I paid the entire $5 in cash.

Starting with wage and price controls in World War II, employer-sponsored insurance became the norm. Insurance (for catastrophes) later turned into “health care” to cover Viagra, acne, diarrhea, and sprained ankles. In 1965, Medicare/Medicaid took regulation to new staggering heights. Every regulation begat more responses from providers, insurance companies, and middlemen involving further paperwork, accountants, attorneys and yet more middlemen.

Technological advances also allow us to keep terminally ill patients alive a few extra weeks or months. (I personally doubt that my wife’s last 3 weeks of suffering from cancer were worth the expense – but it was covered.) “Explanation of Benefits” statements require cryptographic skills – and this is long before the “Affordable Care Act” of 2009, alias “Obamacare”.

People old enough to remember any semblance of a “free unregulated market” in medicine are mostly Medicare recipients. To most people, to even get a Kleenex in a doctor’s office requires sheets of paperwork, dozens of signatures/waivers and insurance cards. This reality has existed for decades and is the only reality known to people who want to feel secure that their coronary bypass will only cost a $100 co-pay.

Since the solution to too much regulation is always more regulation, Obamacare was born. Some of its 2900 pages came from ideas from the Heritage Foundation, George Romney, various HMOs, trade associations and lobbyists. Naturally, the Republicans had their alternative solutions. I have a doctorate in nuclear physics and I doubt I can go through the thousands of pages and relevant legislation and bureaucratic “agency interpretations” in order fathom which bureaucratic mess is “better” – perhaps my kidneys are better off with the Democrats while my liver will fare better with the Republicans?! I suspect that 99.999% of people mouthing off have no clue. It is more like Sunni Islam vs. Shiite Islam – a matter of faith.

The libertarian alternative is to remove government from health care which is a situation completely alien to nearly all Americans. The $100 co-pay for the knee replacement is visible while the rest of the costs are unseen. While Americans can understand religious freedom to choose to worship Jesus vs. Zeus vs. Vishnu; health care freedom comes with responsibility and is an alien concept. And when “the taxpayers” pay for health care, we get the inevitable regulated Nanny State as surely as dropping an egg produces a splat.

But until Americans desire liberty as much as their life, Obamacare—or Boehnercare and PPOs, HMOs, HSAs, EOBs, exchanges, ad tedium—is here to stay. Democratic mommy vs. Republican daddy – we are all children and we had better obey our parents – especially when mommy and daddy are very power hungry and we children have been told that the alternative to regulated health care is sure death.

In spite of all the shutdown nonsense about closing down forests and parks, regulated medicine is only likely to end when the money spigot dries up.

LINKS:

1. http://www.ed2go.com/career/training-programs/medical-coding-billing-course

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx2scvIFGjE

3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/get-your-goddamn-governme_b_252326.html
4. http://www.howto.gov/web-content/requirements-and-best-practices/laws-and-regulations/paperwork-reduction-act
5. http://rsc.scalise.house.gov/solutions/rsc-betterway.htm
6. http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
7. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/12/soda-overweight_n_3429151.html
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli, Ph.D., grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

The Big Dog Wags The Dog

Barack Obama, Government, Military

In the course of the catalogue of Obaminations the president has inflicted on the country, the Big Dog has chosen to wag the dog at convenient times.

To ‘wag the dog’ means to purposely divert attention from what would otherwise be of greater importance, to something else of lesser significance. By doing so, the lesser-significant event is catapulted into the limelight, drowning proper attention to what was originally the more important issue.

(UsingEnglish.com)

The government has spent time and money barring Americans from accessing public places. At the same time, and during a government shutdown, Obama has given the go-ahead for a military operation in Libya and Somalia about which the targeted countries are unhappy.

The seizure in Tripoli of the alleged al-Qaida operative Abu Anas al-Liby prompted the Libyan government to issue an angry statement, questioning the US account that Liby had been detained with its full knowledge. The statement said: “As soon as it heard the reports, the Libyan government contacted the United States authorities to demand an explanation [for] the kidnapping of a Libyan citizen.”
US officials had briefed the media on Saturday that the mission had been conducted with the knowledge of the Libyan government, but on Sunday an official told the Guardian: “We consult regularly with the Libyan government on a range of issues. We do not get into the specifics of our communication.”

(The Guardian)

It’s hard to know what Americans think, if they do indeed think. Will Obama succeed in wooing a war-loving people, or have Americans wizened up to his ways?

Why I am Ashamed Of Being South African By Dan Roodt

BAB's A List, Crime, Critique, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Other than Hermann Giliomee, author of The Afrikaners, I don’t know of a writer in South Africa more astute and insightful than Dan Roodt.

Why I am Ashamed Of Being South African
By Dan Roodt

By definition, excess stands outside reason. (Georges Bataille)

South Africa is known as the rape and murder capital of the world. But that sounds almost anodyne, telling us nothing about the millions of psychos let loose by this crazy government and its many foreign backers.

Just this morning I learned about the macabre murder of a woman of Italian extraction, Vivien Ponté. She was tied up, presumably raped, then slaughtered (there were blood stains all over) and finally set alight upon her own double bed. The Johannesburg Beeld published a picture of her charred bed.

The mainstream media in South Africa have long ceased to keep us informed of all the murders in the country, especially black-on-white murders. The 200 foreign correspondents from the world’s major news media based in Johannesburg generally eschew reporting on anything that would disturb their carefully constructed myth of South Africa as a liberal democracy with a “model constitution”. According to them, our pristine utopia is only occasionally marred by the presence of “die-hard white racists” and people who commit speech crimes like using the “k-word” or even just insinuating that all is not well in Mandelatopia.

Murder, rape, burning women on their beds? What’s that? These incidents almost never make it into print in international English and if they do, they are carefully sanitised so as to remove the grisly, unspeakable, dehumanising details. Currently there is almost a pandemic of child rapes. Even toddlers and babies are regularly subjected to sexual violence. In one case, the maniac of Thokoza, a 42-year old black man called Sifiso Makhubo, raped 34 underage girls and two adult women before he was finally arrested. Makhubo believed that raping girls as young as ten could cure him of HIV-Aids. Of course, in the process he infected many of them. The fact that he conveniently committed suicide on the eve of his trial, did nothing to expiate his crimes.

I must confess: I am ashamed to bear the South African nationality. I cringe whenever someone pronounces the phrase “We South Africans…” To me, everything about South Africa is tainted by the wave of sadistic violence, corruption and mediocrity that have swept the country since 1994. The flag, the anthem, the constitution, our very identity, have all been blighted by our “transformation” – that politically correct cliché – into a criminal, deviant society.

One cannot be proud of anything in South Africa, except perhaps the Drakensberg mountains and the Kruger National Park. Appropriately, the ANC government wants to rename the Kruger and inside its animals, such as rhinos, are being poached. So even there, decay has already set in. Maybe they will rename the Drakensberg too, after some terrorist like Magoo’s Bar bomber Robert McBride or Abu Bakr Ismail, the “commander” – so-called – of the Church Street bomb.

South Africa is a social and political Chernobyl. The disaster predates the leftist coup of 1994 and may be traced to the very foundation of the current state in 1910. Britain, too, committed war crimes and atrocities on our soil during the Anglo-Boer war, but those were swept under the carpet for the sake of “reconciliation between the two white races, English and Afrikaners” as it was put at the time. Boer women and children were harassed, raped and made to starve in the British concentration camps. Many of the atrocities were committed by so-called “armed blacks” that the English employed to terrorise Boer civilians.

So South Africa was more or less conceived in the British camps. It is the fruit of a forced union, then as now. The rape and rapine that Britain and its black helpers visited upon us in 1900 would become the sediment of the slimy and shameful compromises and forgetfulness of politicians. Alas, during the twentieth century we had few leaders of integrity. Verwoerd was a rare exception and without him we would not have been a republic now. For that he was vilified and finally assassinated.

Remarkably, South Africa has largely escaped war on its own soil for more than a century, even though we participated in both world wars on the Allied side. “Never a good deed shall go unpunished,” as the saying goes, and for our loyalty to Britain and the US we have been crucified, calumnied and finally incarcerated in this putative “New South Africa”. Except it is not new. It is old, very old, primitive, even primaeval. It wears the grimace of ancient rituals, killings, human sacrifices. If 1994 were a “liberation” at all, it was the liberation of Freud’s two primal drives: Eros and Thanatos, the latter being the death drive. When the two of them combine, as they have in South Africa, you encounter the set of impulses that still bear the name of an eighteenth-century French writer, the Marquis de Sade.

Every South African is a sadist. The utter perversity and complete lack of any moral compass in our society testify to the almost pristine state of amoral utopia that we have reached: a paradise of cruelty. Everything is permitted; everyone may be bought or bought off and everyone will look the other way, either because they are in on the deal or out of fear.

People often ask me: “If you are so ashamed and disgusted by South Africa, why don’t you leave?” I think the short answer is that, given the decades of slander directed at Afrikaners, most other countries would rather welcome a Rwandan war criminal than an Afrikaans writer, so no other state would have me. But then, I ask myself, if our women could “walk barefoot over the Drakensberg” as Susanna Smit famously put it, why should we simply abandon our land to these squads of sadists? The more complex answer is that a place as sick as South Africa needs a few psychiatrists, a few sane people to at least write up the manic convulsions of the patient.

It feels as if I have only broached the subject. There is so much more to say and to explain, of how we got to be inmates in this, our sadists’ castle.

This could well turn into a series, on the shame of being South African.

(Ruins of the Château de Lacoste in the Vaucluse department, home of the Marquis de Sade)

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DAN ROODT, Ph.D., is a noted Afrikaner activist, author, literary critic and director of PRAAG (which features my weekly column). He is the author of the polemical essay, “The Scourge of the ANC”.