You'll feel much better about things after reading this sob story... trust us

The healthcare.gov website recovery/resurrection deadline of December 1st has come and gone and as far as we can tell the spin coming out of the White House has been that enough improvements have been made that they can declare victory and move on… to talk about anything… anything other than that damned website.


OK, then, but…

If u r an Obama hack & considering the back end is nowhere near being complete, you'd b insane if u wanted a fully functioning website.#ACA

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) December 2, 2013

As a slight aside, at least one cyber-security expert thinks the pre-existing security concerns have been made worse by the “fix”.

“It doesn’t appear that any security fixes were done at all,” David Kennedy, CEO of the online security firm TrustedSec, told the Washington Free Beacon.

Kennedy said fundamental safeguards missing from Healthcare.gov that were identified by his company more than a month ago have yet to be put in place.

“There are a number of security concerns already with the website, and that’s without even actually hacking the site, that’s just a purely passive analysis of [it],” he said. “We found a number of critical exposures that were around sensitive information, the ability to hack into the site, things like that. We reported those issues and none of those appear to have been addressed at all.”

After warning Americans when testifying before Congress on Nov. 19 to stay away from Healthcare.gov, Kennedy now says the situation is even worse.

But back to and to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, accessing the website so we can find out what’s in it – that may not end up so well.


Via Hot Air:

Binns had been trying to navigate the government’s health care website since October to find affordable insurance for her husband, a 60-year-old who has a pre-existing condition and whose job doesn’t offer coverage.

What she finally found for him Monday carries a premium of more than $400 a month and a $5,000 annual deductible.
“How can I pay this kind of money out?” she asked. “It’s going to take at least a second job and praying that I would make enough on a second job just to pay for this health insurance.”
…
“I thought this was going to be the miracle for us,” she said, “and it’s not.”

Expecting miracles of your federal government is probably not the healthiest sentiment for a functioning constitutional republic a concept from which we are moving away at break-neck speed if you have been paying attention.


But what is most puzzling about this anecdote is that the elderly and/or people with pre-existing conditions… these people… were they very people ObamaCare was supposed to help. Yeah, we all knew that the young and healthy were going to take in the shorts, paying more for healthcare they won’t use in order to subsidize the care for people like the Binns but it turns out the Binns are getting screwed as well.


Kind of puts a dent in that “wealth redistribution” argument conservatives and libertarians have been making against ObamaCare, huh? Really tough to make that argument when it appears that everyone is getting soaked by this thing.


It wasn’t supposed to be this way but don’t you, in that egalitarian heart of yours, feel better that your government is not appearing to be playing favorites. Yeah, we thought so.




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The Eurozone and #OWS

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Here's KT on the current Eurozone situation:

The Europeans are facing rising borrowing costs. In a moral sense, this is mathematics enforcing what they as a society could not - the denial of desires. They wanted socialized medicine, so they took it. The wanted plump retirements, so they took them. Like children whose parents have given up on discipline, they've grabbed everything for themselves. Now the stern hand of the market is coming down on them to restore the discipline they threw away in a frenzy of selfishness that they claimed was "compassion."

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Meanwhile, closer to home here in San Diego, here are some more charming antics by the #OWS set "occupying" a local Wal Mart on Black Friday (via B-Daddy). These flash occupies sprang up at numerous other Wal Mart's around the country and you had a case of Occupiers blocking access to an Apple store up in the Bay Area on Friday as well.





Now, ain't that a turn: The Occupiers will dictate to you just who it is you can partronize, where you can shop and what you can buy.

Because nothing says "power to the people" and sticking it to The Man like denying other people their freedom to enter into a voluntary contract with the provider of their choice and access to inexpensive yet quality goods and merchandise. Isn't WalMart precisely the type of equalizer and money- stretcher these goons should be championing if they were truly serious about doing something about income inequality?


And you would not be mistaken if you sense a familiar theme running through the disgruntled and rioting Eurozone masses and the #OWS set. It's a theme of entitlement. Entitlement to manufactured "rights" and entitlement to other people's goods, services and property.

A consistent demand we hear from #OWS is student loan forgiveness and home loand debt forgiveness. They essentially are demanding free education and free housing. What these economic illiterates do not realize or do not care to realize is that nothing is free. Someone had to pay for that college to be built. Someone had to pay the professor to lecture on the worthless, unemployable degree that the school will be handing out and someone had pay for the material and labor that built the houses that are now under-water.

Just as the Occupiers do not realize the ridiculous irony of preventing consumer choice by shutting down retailers on Black Friday, they also do not realize that the cost of a free education (via student loan debt forgiveness) and/or free housing (via home loan debt forgiveness) will just be passed along to the 99% they claim to represent in the form of higher taxes, fees and housing prices of future sales.

Nothing is free. Not health care, not housing, not education, nor plump retirement plans. Nothing. The actions and logic employed by #OWS and Eurozone citizenry running contrary to this set of facts prove a deep-seated immaturity and a childish unwillingness to confront reality. It's all completely selfish moral preening in the name of "justice"


Math wins. Math always wins.

When health care really isn't about health

Want to know what ObamaCare is going to look like? Look no further than its predecessor, RomneyCare in Massachusetts which only 4 years after being signed into law is unraveling at the seams.

Back in April, the Massachusetts insurance commissioner rejected 235 of 274 premium increases that state insurers had submitted for approval as the carriers said these increases were needed to cover unexpected claims, as underlying Mass. health care costs continued to rise annually at an 8% clip (but, didn't they tell us government-managed health care would bend the cost curve downward?)

Now we learn that the state's 5 major insurers have, so far, collectively lost $116 million due to a rate cap imposed upon them by fiat. And no amount of demagoguing the evil insurance industry is going to prevent rates from continuing to climb as long as the imposition of an ever-increasing regulatory regime is calling the shots in the health care industry.

But, they told us that government-managed health care would contain costs?

They may have said that and they may have even believed it but that's not what they are really pursuing. Though ardent ObamaCare supporters will swear up and down that rationing is simply not a component of ObamaCare, the very people who will be administering ObamaCare keep slipping up by exposing their true intentions.

"If you're going to do health-care cost containment, it has to be stealth," said Jon Kingsdale, speaking at a conference sponsored by the New Republic magazine last October. "It has to be unsuspected by any of the key players to actually have an effect." Mr. Kingsdale is the former director of the Massachusetts "connector," the beta version of ObamaCare's insurance "exchanges," and is now widely expected to serve as an ObamaCare regulator.

He went on to explain that universal coverage was "fundamentally a political strategy question"—a way of finding a "significant systematic way of pushing back on the health-care system and saying, 'No, you have to do with less.' And that's the challenge, how to do it. It's like we're waiting for a chain reaction but there's no catalyst, there's nothing to start it."

(italics, ours)

We don't know what Kingsdale would call that but we sure do.

And check out this short video clip (H/T: Left Coast Rebel) on Obama's freshly-minted recess appointment to head up Medicare and Medicaid, Dr. Donald Berwick:



Again, once you declare a particular goods and service a "right" you will be paying through the nose for it.

And how about "holding politicians accountable"? We currently have Congressmen refusing to meet with their constituents at town halls and other public meetings because of the hell they know they are going to catch because of ObamaCare. Is Berwick referring to that kind of accountability?

And then the money quote: "Health care is by definition redistributional". We're thankful for two things right now: These egg-head seminars and Youtube without either of which would we be able to hear people like Berwick lettin'er rip and exposing their true intentions.

By their own words, Berwick and Kingsdale, the very people who will be running ObamaCare, admit that the quality of individual care is not a priority but rather the degree of equality of care. If the degree of individual quality of care suffers and suffers greatly under ObamaCare as a result of rationing or price controls (rationing by proxy), as long as everyone has equal access to the same crappy health care then health care can be declared a success.

Don't believe us. Just take it from Berwick and Kingsdale.

Trickle-down statism

How refreshing to hear that unions do indeed understand market economics and progressive taxation, afterall: that corporations don't ultimately pay taxes, their customers and employees do.

“While the excise tax is slated to be imposed on the insurers on so-called high cost plans, the tax will be passed on to enrollees in the form of higher premiums, co-pays or reduced benefits,” a coalition of public-employee unions wrote congressional leaders. “Characterizing this tax proposal as a ‘Cadillac tax’ is a misnomer. It hits the average blue collar and white collar employee.”

It's a wonderful thing, that 2x4 of reality upside one's skull (something of which union types have traditionally been on the giving end), that suddenly has heretofore economic ignoramuses channeling Art Laffer and Milton Friedman.

Alas, the President, with respect to the unions and public sector employees exclusively, was channeling those two aforementioned gentlemen as well in deciding to exempt these groups from the so-called "Cadillac" health plan excise tax.

That the rest of us will now be bearing that tax burden should not be troubling as the underpinning morality of Obamacare has always been "equality" and paying just a tad more than your fair share to achieve that end should justify the means.

The ends one will need to go to escape Obamacare

So, it’s supposed to be about equality and equal access, right?

That would explain why the longshoremen’s union is exempt from the excise tax on the “Cadillac plans” and also the survival of full Medicare Advantage benefits in Florida to the exclusion of everywhere else.

Equality of Obamacare is also illustrated by the fact that we will all be chipping in for Nebraska’s share of Medicare… forever. And let’s not forget about religious equality in Obamacare. The amish are exempt altogether from Obamacare.

“There is a religious exemption in the bill,” said Roseanne Placey, spokeswoman with the Pennsylvania Department of Insurance, “which would apply to them, since they believe the religious duty of communities is to provide for one another when they are sick.”

Caring for each other through personal and/or private philanthropic means? What a concept.

But expect this massive statist incursion into our lives to choke-off even more of the self-reliant charitable spirit that is a manifestation of American exceptionalism.

After all, the government’s got it all covered, right?

The Week in Review

We lend the housing crisis some perspective.

Gay marriage: All about equality and respect for others.

We lend the Laker season some perspective.

More proof that this guy just ain’t ready for prime-time.

And our Radio KBwD feature.