Looks like we'll be learning these lessons the hard way

.

America’s paper of record seems genuinely perplexed that the new health care law that mandates more benefits from health insurers and adds more people into the health care system, isn’t coming anywhere near the advertised goal of ObamaCare: bending downward the cost curve of health care.

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.
…

The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy.PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.

(italics, ours)

No proof of this is offered.


Back to the article:

Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.

We’ve got news for Mr. Jones: that is no loophole and it’s not a bug… it’s a feature. In crafting the legislation, allowing health insurers to raise rates unilaterally was most likely a concession to the insurers in return for the feds setting limits on profits and administrative costs.

That’s how things get done legislatively, though, you may be asking yourself what the results of traditional sausage-making done by paid politicians and health care lobbyists are going to actually improve your personal health care and health care costs. That’s a damn fine question.


Maybe to help answer that question, we can look across the pond to ObamaCare enthusiasts' favorite healthcare system, Britain’s NHS (National Health Service):

An official inquiry into failings at the hospital, where between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly due to a catalogue of failings and appalling standards of care, is due to be published later this month.

The report is expected to blame managers who cut costs and reduced staffing levels in an attempt to hit "efficiency" targets and win foundation status.

Before taking control of the health service, Sir David ran the health authority responsible for supervising Stafford between August 2005 and April 2006.

His tenure came during a four-year period in which between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly due to a catalogue of failings and appalling standards of care at Mid Staffordshire NHS trust.

And later in the same article:

The report, the result of a two year-long inquiry led by Robert Francis QC, is expected to call for major reforms of the NHS including new controls to identify and remove bad managers and an improved training programme for nurses and health care assistants.

It will warn that a "culture of fear" filtering down from Whitehall made managers obsessed with hitting targets, even when to do so would mean putting patients at risk.

Doctors at Stafford were called away from critical patients to treat less urgent Accident and Emergency patients because a central target said all patients should be discharged from A&E units within four hours, the inquiry reportedly heard.

Patients were left unwashed, unfed and in soiled bedsheets, while nurses were told that "heads would roll" and the A&E department could close if targets were missed.

(emphasis, ours)


ObamaCare has granted Medicare the power to reward and punish hospitals based upon patient care and, in fact, just recently Medicare reduced re-imbursement rates for 8 San Diego-area hospitals for not meeting ObamaCare's patient care goals.

Though well-intended, the NHS provides a great example of the un-intended consequences of the government incentivizing better patient care when, in reality, the results are the exact opposite.

Despite examples like this, looks like we are going to learn these lessons the hard way.

.

Sarah sez

.

One in a series that takes a look at some of the wild, zany and madcap things said by the former governor of Alaska.






Palin was talking politics and the consequences of President Obama’s successful re-election bid and with it she gives her insights to opposition to the President and his policies and how she believes a constitutional republic should look when she suggested that perhaps the only thing left for the President to do was to make like “a third-world dictator and throw these guys (the opposition) in jail.”













No, Palin is undergoing chemo or anything like that. The dictatorial-championing guest there on Al Sharpton’s show was dictator-loving former pop sensation, Harry Belafonte.


The clip cut him off so maybe we missed him explain how it is that a 51-48 victory in the popular vote is a mandate. We recall landsides in the electoral college and 20 point margins back in ’80 and ’84 and people were still saying mean and nasty stuff about Reagan and opposing his policies. Maybe ol’ Harry forgot about that.

And for those of you who think Harry has lost it; in actuality what Belafonte is talking about as the ultimate end of progressivism has already been codified in law as the President does indeed have the power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without cause via the National Defense Authorization Act.



Politics trumps everything to those on the left. No rational discussion regarding our completely unsustainble entitlement programs can be had because they are the sacred cows of the left and even suggesting some sort of reform measures while their messiah is in office is danm-near treason.

Willing to cede to even modest reforms to Social Security and Medicare is to admit to the defeat of social democracy model for which they fought so hard and which is in process of ruining Europe as we speak. As such, they are completely content to fiddle away as Washington D.C. and soon after, the rest of the country burns.


Jail? We voted ourselves to that.

Video clip of the day

.

For all the unseriousness displayed in Washington D.C. with respect to reigning-in spending and, more impoortantly, having a plan for dealing with the current unsustainable state of our entitlement programs, there is one person who stands apart.

Bill Whittle on Afterburner discusses Paul Ryan and why it is the Democrats are completely freaked-out by him.


(Video approx. 5-1/2 minutes long. You can skip, thank god, the expletive-laden commercial after just a few seconds. Why is Youtube sponsoring this garbage?)





Ryan: Not old, stupid or dumb, the 3 characterizations with which statists have pegged Republicans/conservatives over the past 30-40 years.

Whittle explains how this is a barometer election for America and that if Romney/Ryan loses, America, like say, much of southern Europe, has not yet faced up to the waste, greed and corruption of our government at the state and local levels.

Adults, not rock-stars nor addled, blithering idiots.




Addendum #1: Hey, did you know Paul Ryan once had a black girlfriend?

Yep, that's the sort of vetting we can expect from today's media.

Just a reminder, gang...

.

...Paul Ryan is going to end/kill/destroy/whatever Medicare as we know it, except for everyone in Florida, DNC chair's Debbie Wasserman Schultz's home state, 55 and over... well, 55 and over in every other state of the union as well.

We think we may have figured out why the Democrats picked Schultz to lead the Democratic National Committee as this clip with Wolf Blitzer will ably demonstrate: message discipline.

On the issue of changes to Medicare for folks over 55 which the Ryan plan does not effect, she has her talking points and, by damn, she's going to stick to them.





At 2:10 she effectively concedes the 55 year-old cut off line before declaring that unacceptable and then moving right back into her talking points narrative of how Paul Ryan is going to end/kill/destroy/whatever Medicare as we know it.


The intellectual heft being displayed here gives a glimpse into the reason why many on the left are cringing at the thought of a vice-presidential debate.





Related: The Onion gives Paul Ryan the treatment. Boy, do they:

(language warning)

When Mitt Romney selected me as his running mate, I knew the Democratic attack dogs would come out in full force. They would say I’m a right-wing ideologue. They would say my views on entitlement programs are far too radical. They would say putting me on the ticket immediately kills Mitt Romney’s chances of becoming president because I’m a liability. But if we’re being honest with each other—if we’re able to put aside the talking points for a few minutes and say what we’re all actually thinking and feeling—I believe we can acknowledge the real truth here.

I’m young, I’m handsome, I’m smart, and I’m articulate. And that scares the ever-loving shit out of you. You can pretend like you have this thing in the bag, but you know good goddamn well that this race just got real interesting, real fast.

It’s okay to admit it. You’re frightened to death of me. It might actually be healthy for you to face your fears now rather than later, when Mitt and I are leading by a few points in the polls and it looks like this thing might end badly for you. Face it: I’m not some catastrophe waiting to happen, like a Sarah Palin or a Dan Quayle. On the contrary, you have the exact opposite fear. I’m a solid, competent, some might say exceptional, politician.

Read the rest of this amazingly non-ironic bit here.

Yet another entitlement program spiraling upwards out of control

.

First, a programming alert: due to a heavy workload and annual mid-March (Madness) opening rounds television viewing obligations, blogging will be light for the next few days. By, the by, we're gunning for a border war in the finals: Mizzou v. Kansas.


.

Similar to what then-Speaker Pelosi said when she spoke of passing the ObamaCare bill to see what's in it, the Congressional Budget Office is having to wait year to year in their progressive 10-year budget analysis to see how much ObamaCare is actually going to cost.

President Obama's national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.

Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO's standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama's pledge that the legislation would cost "around $900 billion over 10 years." When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.

(italics, ours)

Or, as it's known in Placentia, California, "fraudulent behaviour".

A doubling of the cost in just two years: a trend line to be proud of.

The taxes and fees to pay for ObamaCare started in 2010 but the full range of goodies don't start kicking in until 2014.

Recall, it was the Democrats who claimed that Republicans were the cause of death to 40,000 Americans a month because of their obstruction of ObamaCare. We'd like a CBO projection on the number of deaths caused by this delayed implementation of ObamaCare due to fiscal chicanery.


Just 3 years ago, we had on our "unsustainable entitlement plate", Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Now, due to a goods-and-services-as-rights mentality that has taken hold of this country, we can now add ObamaCare to the plate of things we have no way in hell of paying for.

.

Link of the day

B-Daddy in writing about Medicare and fraud presented this from Aghaegbuna Odelugo who was testifying before Congress about Medicare fraud but wandered off course and started riffing on Medicare reimbursement rates:

I would like to finally talk about what I perceive to be the most significant flaw in Medicare: the rates of reimbursement. I do not know who decides, or how the decision is made, but the rate of reimbursement for certain pieces of durable medical equipment is beyond exorbitant. An example is the case of the knee braces. These items are available on the market to a DME provider for less than $100.00. Medicare, however, reimburse, if I remember correctly, approximately 1,000% of this cost. Back braces that cost approximately $100.00 are reimbursed at a rate of almost 900%. Wheelchairs that cost less than $1,000.00 are reimbursed at almost 500% of cost. For anyone engaging in fraud, these numbers are too good to be true.

Not fraud, not even a bug, but a feature!

Medicare is popular and expensive. No wonder, right? Expensive for obvious reasons as illustrated above but popular also because of a lack of cost transparency. It's not as if you are paying out of pocket for those mark-ups... not expensive for you so what's to worry about?

And that's pretty much it: "paying into a system" soon slips the clutches of reality as increased layers of bureaucracy and rules and regulations shield just what are the real costs of healthcare. And when those rules and regs are at the whim of the pols, there is no end to the amount of candy that will be tossed around.



Here's B-Daddy to wrap things up:

Ultimately, I understand that the U.S. has a robust social safety net. But I think we have gone overboard. We aren't a country that promises cradle to grave support, like socialist Europe.

There might not be an explicit promise but there appears to be an increasing implicit acceptance by the public that there is indeed a promise of cradle to grave support. How else do you explain the across-the-board bad polling numbers when it comes to any mention of entitlement reform?

Until there is "skin in the game", until there is true cost transparency as to realizing what health care goods and services actually cost and until we remove the layers between the health care providers and consumers, we will never succeed in bending the cost curve downward.

Fear not: Gen X is on its way!

Earlier, this spring in conjunction with some commentary about Paul Ryan's budget proposal we spoke of a book Generations we read some twenty years ago. The book framed the history of the country in terms of 4 consecutive and recurrng generational co-horts. Of course, we were most interested in our generation, the Gen Xers and our Reactive generational cohorts that preceded us. The narrative arc that was common to our cohort generations was that though they were dismissed as shiftless screw-ups earlier in life (F. Scott Fitzgerald of the Lost Generation of the roaring 20s was the poster boy for Gen X's slackers of the 90s), they were called upon to make the tough calls and sacrifices in adulthood (think FDR, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Harry Truman guiding the nation during the Great Depression and WWII).

With entitlement reform finally getting off top-dead-center at the state level, it's becoming increasing clear the 800 lb. gorilla sitting in the room at the federal level is the scrap that Generation X is going to be asked to take on.

And it's also becoming increasingly clear that we are not alone in that thought. Dig this from Reed Galen:

I believe we as a country, and more specifically those of us in the Gen X cohort, are looking in the mirror today. The question facing us is essentially the same: do we have what it takes?

Folks should be forgiven for asking, “For God’s sake, what’s next?” For any number of reasons we can’t seem to buy a break. And for entirely too many of us, we’re looking for someone to come help us fix our problems, either those we share as a people, those thrust upon us, or those of our own making. To return to my semi-Texas roots, it’s bootstrap time. To the extent each of us have the ability to solve our problems, now is the time to get after it. One thing is clear: the cavalry isn’t coming; they sold the horses and sent the rifles to Mexico.

(ed. note: we have no idea whether or not Galen was speaking tongue-in-cheek with respect to that last statement because he speaketh the literal truth.)

More than a small amount of time is spent blaming ”the system.” It’s the system’s fault Washington can’t get its act together. It’s the system’s fault bankers make too much money. It’s the system’s fault the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. What the system has created the most of though, is apathy. Worse than apathy is antipathy. We are a hair’s breadth away from "the system" being seen as not just unfair but illegitimate. When 17% of voters claim in a recent survey that the Federal government is no longer qualified to tell them what to do, antipathy is taking hold of the populace generally and the electorate specifically.

(ed. note: can we be forgiven for thinking 17% is disappointingly small?)

More Galen:

As my generation is actuarially responsible for the safety nets of our elders, we should double-down on the assumption that we’re on our own. Not much more complaining needed on that front: We made a promise to look after them the day we joined the workforce; maybe even the day we first showed up in our parents’ arms.

I hope, like me, most of my generation doesn’t plan to sit around and worry about what "the system" has done, or might do to them. The days of thinking about how things were, or how things should be are gone. Everyday we go out and try to make the best life we can for ourselves and our families, and ask "the system" to just leave us alone. If the Beltway politicians want to screw around with debt ceilings and Super Committees that will do little other than raise our cost of living, have at it. But there are a lot more out here like us than they think - and they ignore us at their peril

.

Folks, the tea party is Generation X. Mocked, reviled and scorned but guess what? We figured it out. For all our human flaws and frailties and for all our missteps, real and perceived, we know what needs to be done. While the rest of the world is content to whistle past the graveyard, we are fully cognizant and prepared to make those sacrifices that must be made if we desire to see this country retain its greatness and not descend into a state of a banana republic, a destination at which we most certainly will arrive unless very specific and rapid course corrections are made.

To quote Secular Apostate: "If anybody was going to take up the slack for you, they would have arrived already."


Have a great rest of your Sunday. We'll see everybody bright and early on Monday.

Perhaps not so affordable after all

We pretty much knew it all along but it was just us right-wing pitch fork wielders that were openly questioning the President's claim that ObamaCare, his signature piece of legislation, would bend the health care cost curve downward. Now, Obama's own actuarians in the CMS are saying that health care costs will be slightly more under ObamaCare than if the law were not enacted.

The Affordable Care Act will drive health care spending up slightly, to nearly a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product by 2020, while extending insurance coverage to 30 million more Americans, a new report from CMS projects.

But health care’s hefty share of the country’s economic output is reached through an average annual growth in medical spending of 5.8 percent over the next decade — just 0.1 percent more than would have been spent without the health reform law, the report claims.


CMS published its findings this morning in Health Affairs. The report also projects that once all the data are in, health spending in 2010 will have grown a historically low 3.9 percent — slightly lower than the previous record low growth of 4 percent in 2009.

That’s an aftershock of the recession, which cost millions of people their jobs and, consequently, their health insurance, slowing medical spending.

At a Health Affairs forum Wednesday, CMS chief actuary Rick Foster, who has a record of questioning long-range spending projections based on overly optimistic assumptions, nonetheless said that “we like to think that the reality in 2014 will be much closer to the projections” than similar projections from the past.

If implemented as written, the health care law will “create a whole new world of health care spending,” Foster said.

Still, there are plenty of caveats. For one, the report assumes that physician payments next year will be cut by almost 30 percent in accordance with the Sustainable Growth Rate formula, even though Congress has blocked the cuts for the past 10 years.

In a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Foster said that the report also includes productivity improvements that would slow the growth of spending by 1.1 percent each year, a pace that, “in the long run, it may be difficult to sustain.” He added that revenue projections for an excise tax on exceptionally generous employer-offered health plans, slated to take effect in 2018, may be lower than expected.

(italics, ours)

Not painting such a rosy picture now, is it?

The CMS report can be found here.


And that's it. After all that. After all the arm-twisting and back room deal-making. After all the kickbacks, sweetheart deals and horse-trading. After an exhaustive and contentious sausage-making ordeal that was the very antithesis of the Hope and Change he promised to bring to Washington D.C. and which cost him considerable political capitol of his own, the damn thing, by his people's own admission won't bring down the cost of health care as he promised.

Entitlement programs by the numbers...

... but first this from Michael A. Walsh:

Forget all the numbers being tossed around in Washington -- the millions and billions and trillions of dollars being taxed, borrowed, printed and spent as the country approaches the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline.

Forget the political jockeying for position between a president desperately seeking re-election in 16 months and a Congress equally desperately seeking not to be blamed for spending even more money that we don't have.

Forget the fact that such "entitlements" as Social Security and Medicare -- social-insurance programs that the public long thought to be actuarially sound -- have been exposed as little more than legal Ponzi schemes, paying today's benefits out of tomorrow's borrowed receipts.


Instead, just ask yourself this simple question: When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?

For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about -- the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state. If you don't believe it, just look at President Obama's veiled threat to withhold Grandma's Social Security benefits if Congress doesn't let him borrow another $2 trillion or so to get himself safely past the 2012 election.

(italics, ours)

Now some numbers:

43 : the cents borrowed by the Feds for every dollar they spend.

1/2 : the amount of the federal budget ($3.8 trillion) consumed by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and debt interest.

12 billion : What they said, back in 1966, Medicare would cost in 1990 adjusted for inflation.

107 billion: What it actually cost.

5 : The number of workers for every Social Security recipient in 1960.

3 : The number of workers for every Social Security recipient today.

No wonder the trustees of the system themselves -- including three Obama Cabinet officials -- warned in their most recent report on the health of the entitlement system: "Projected long-run program costs for both Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable under currently scheduled financing, and will require legislative corrections if disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers are to be avoided."

No sober or rational person can deny that significant structural changes will need to be made to our entitlement programs if we as a country wish to remain solvent yet no one, and most importantly, including the American public, seems willing to eat our peas, to borrow a phrase, with respect to accepting the inevitable.

Walsh finishes with this:

The preamble to the Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare state. For the welfare state is incompatible with the rest of the preamble, which concludes: "and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." By definition, dependents are not free.

He's right. How can we be called "free" if we have allowed ourselves to be taken hostage by debts and deficits brought on by government programs of our own doing?

More whistling

Yesterday, we noted how ecstatic the liberal punditry was with the Democratic special election victory in NY-26 as they saw it as a rebuking of Paul Ryan's Medicare plan. Whistling past the graveyard as it were because these progressives, these alleged agents of change, are in reality, champions of the staus quo.

For a perfect illustration of this new do-nothingness check out this exchange between former Clinton adviser, Simon Rosenberg and radio host Ben Ferguson.




And that's a wrap...


Not only is no plan advanced by Rosenberg, there is simply no debate to be had either and Rosenberg is reduced to the petulant equivalent of taking his ball and going home. Another flee-bagger, if you will.


Memo to the political class: You don't like Ryan's plan? Fine. Put forth a plan of your own and quit demagoguing an issue that's well past high time in being addressed.

Joe Klein: pretty damn stoked over indebting future generations

We freely admit that we didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the special election up in NY-26 where Democrat Kathy Hochul won in a solidly Republican district and which was alleged to be a referendum on Paul Ryan's Medicare reform plan. (For why that may not have been so, check out Left Coast Rebel's assessment, here)

With the apparent national implications of this race, of course, it has to be picked apart nine ways to Sunday by the punditry.

To wit, liberal pundit Joe Klein was yukkin' it up with that hack Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC a couple of nights ago and having a little fun with the never-to-be-mentioned-in-polite-company "S" word. Click here for the exchange.

"It was a victory for socialism," TIME's Joe Klein said of last night's election result in NY-26. A Democrat won a special election to fill a vacancy in the U.S. House from a very conservative district in New York.

"For the last two years, Republicans have been lambasting Barack Obama who is right in the middle of the political spectrum, a mild liberal, as being a wild-eyed socialist. Well, there ain't anything that he has proposed that is purely socialistic as our Medicare program; a single payer program run by the government. And the folks love it," Klein also said.

Yes, the folks love it and it's going broke, Joe.


Yeah, ol' Joe was being facetious perhaps but it's good to know that both he and O'Donnell were so tickled over a victory for the status quo, a victory for doing absolutely nothing about the state of our unsustainable obligations and entitlement programs be it Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or state employee union pension and benefit programs. Klein and O'Donnell: definetely not math majors.

Both parties have been whistling past the graveyard for years now with respect to this looming and monumental problem and yet when someone like President Bush merely offers up privatizing a max of 10% of one's Social Security account, much of the public and the whole of the political class went absolutely bonkers - for purely political reasons, for the most part, but bonkers none the less which resulted in a silencing of any further debate on the matter.

Call it scare tactics, call it fringe politics that are exploiting people's fears... call it what you want but it's well past high time to start having these adult conversations about our entitlements while the establishment in both parties continue their whistling.



You know, it's funny: "reform" has such a positive political connotation on about everthing (immigration, Wall St., campaign finance, (re-)districting... you name it) except when it comes to "entitlement". That has to change - the math demands it.

Ticking off all the right people?

It's his second Wait, What? moment of the week. First, he says no to ethanol subsidies in Iowa and then in Florida... well, given what he threw down in the Hawkeye state, you can probably guess the rest.

CORAL GABLES — A day after telling Iowans their beloved ethanol subsidies will have to go, Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty used a stop in senior-heavy Florida to call for reining in Social Security and Medicare benefits for future retirees.

The former Minnesota governor, who launched his campaign Monday, talked about entitlement reform during a 30-minute Facebook town hall and in a question-and-answer session with reporters at the Biltmore hotel.

It's part of a tough-medicine tour, designed to highlight Pawlenty's willingness to tell "hard truths." He's also planning to visit Washington to call for less-generous pay and benefits for public sector employees and to New York to call for an end to Wall Street bailouts.

"We won't have Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security as we know it in the future if we don't make changes and adjustments now that can preserve these important programs," Pawlenty told the Facebook audience.

For his part, Pawlenty likes but stopped short of endorsing Paul Ryan's Medicare plan as he will be rolling out his own plan, shortly.

We're heartened that Pawlenty is making these kind of statements especially in the territories he is doing so. The timing of them, being the first significant policy statements by any of the prospective GOP field, helps to shape and drive the debate. Energy subsidies and entitlement reform are important topics that we can ill-afford to leave unaddressed. Let's see then how the others will respond to Pawlenty's opening salvos.

It's still way early and heeding our own advice of not shacking-up with anyone just yet, T-Paw, however, gets first crack at a second date with us.

Winning

*



Alternate headline: "It's the math, stupid"




Much has been made of the situation in Wisconsin with respect to who was winning, who won, did Scott Walker win the battle but lose the war, etc., etc. It's all a moot point because do you know who, or more precisely, what is winning? Math. Math is winning.

Here's KT on the matter of math and unsustainable liabilities:

Assume for a second that Wisconsin Governor Walker is the worst politician in the history of Man. Assume that he's incapable of making his point with the voters. It doesn't matter. Eventually, he will be replaced by a competent politician and the math will still be there. The Democrats can at best only find a temporary escape from defeat because the force of the argument is numerical, not ideological.

And now, Peggy Noonan on math and unsustainable liabilities:

One estimate of New Jersey's bill for health and pension benefits for state workers over the next 30 years is an astounding $100 billion—money the state literally does not have and cannot get. The very force of the math has the heartening effect of squeezing ideology right out of the story. It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a conservative, it's all about the numbers, and numbers are sobering things.

And check out this doo-doo that got dropped in California's increasingly cloudy punch bowl a couple of days ago:

California taxpayers just took a huge punch in the nose from the same actuaries who provided the cover for state politicians to spike public employee retirement benefits. The latest shocker comes from California State Controller John Chiang, who just unveiled a new actuarial report
that shows California faces another unfunded debt of $59.9 billion to pay for retiree health and dental benefits over the next 30 years.

Controller Chiang highlighted that the unfunded liability grew during the 2010 fiscal year by $8.1 billion; an amount equal to almost 25 percent of this year’s entire California kindergarten through high school education budget.

Actuaries have aided and abetted the explosion in under-funding of pension and healthcare liabilities for public employee pension plans over the last 10 years. With most public employee pension plans fully funded in 2000, a preposterous actuary study gave assurances that the technology stock market bubble of the 1990s would continue its high returns and never burst.

Unfortunately, both California and the nation have chief executives who don't do math or refuse to acknowledge math.

Back in November, California desired a state government dominated by Democrats. Fair enough. A Democrat (Jerry Brown) as governor and the assembly and state senate firmly in control of the Democrats. Too bad they seem completely unwilling to do some pretty basic math and thus lack the testicular fortitude to confront their cash cows in the public employee unions.

Our President has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be the post-partisan president he campaigned on but has not come close to fulfilling by working with a Republican-controlled Congress on entitlement reform but he too doesn't want to do Math 101 and has instead cravenly abdicated any leadership role in the budget process.

Democrat, Republican, conservative, independant or liberal. It doesn't matter. At some point, someone has to do the math.

Smart, courageous leaders do math. All the others don't.




* Shameless yet somewhat relevant visual grab

Video clip of the day

Here's New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday addressing the subject of Social Security reform.

As one can readily see, entitlement spending makes up the lion's share of the budget and until meaningful Social Security and Medicare reform are addressed, we're all just nibbling at the margins to negligible effect.

The President abdicated any real leadership in his budget proposal to that end so it's going to have to fall to the party that tried to address it six years ago and got clobbered for their troubles. To be fair, it was President Bush who offered up some modest proposals like privatizing up to 10% of one's Social Security account which was viewed as a violation of some sacred public trust by the left and very tepidly even by many in his own party.

Christie says time's are different. Maybe they are. We have seen now the Greece fires raging in Europe and the imminent implosions of state budgets stateside because of unsustainable future obligations. We need leadership but we also need to accept the pain that will be required to set ourselves on a sustainable path.


H/T: Hot Air and Left Coast Rebel

Specially reserved language

Who's up for some more Dr. Donald Berwick quotes (the man who will be running Medicare and Medicaid)?

Here's Berwick on British socialized medicine:

"I am romantic about National Health Service. I love it (because it is) 'generous, hopeful, confident, joyous and just.'"

The only adjective you should be using in favorable terms to describe a bureaucracy is "coldly efficient". However, you know you are in for interesting times when a high level appointee eschews this guideline to the point that you feel he's springing a wee bit o' wood.

And here's Berwick on the Brits' NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence):

"It acts as a comparative-effectiveness tool for the National Health Care Service, comparing various treatments and determining whether the benefits the patients receives - SUCH AS PROLONGED LIFE - are cost-efficient for the government" (lifenews.com, May 27).

(emphasis, ours)

Now, what is it you suppose that this NICE does, in effect? In case you are having some difficulties in figuring it out, let's let the good doctor, himself, explain:

"It's not a question of whether we will ration health care. It is whether we will ration with our eyes open."

We're not quite sure what that eyes open thing is all about but what we think Berwick is stating about ObamaCare is that there will be rationing. Just a thought.

Again, all the protestations from the Obamabots railing against the usage of terms like "rationing" and "death panels" aside, one only need to look at the language of those who will be administering it to see they are saying the same thing in both explicit and implicit terms.

Confounding compromises

Harry Reid has apparently put together a compromise between 10 Democrat Senators (5 libs and 5 moderates) that will a) offer private insurance plans under the auspices of the federal employee health program and b) will enable middle-aged Americans to buy into Medicare. Of course, Harry isn’t letting on in any of the details… any of the details that will effect every man, woman and child’s healthcare. But never mind all that transparency, what of these compromises?

Ostensibly, this private insurance plan “option” is for those who are not currently covered for a variety of different reasons, the cost of health insurance being chief among them. But think about this for a moment: if the private insurance option is held to the same standards of coverage as the federal employee health program, how is that going to be affordable? On its surface, this private option solves nothing and in fact, makes it worse as it will, in most cases, be more expensive than most other coverage plans out there in the market.

The very people that are currently opting out of health insurance coverage will be forced to purchase something that is more expensive than their current options. Then what? Are you going to throw these people in jail because of the no-win situation created by the private option?

One would think liberals would be outraged by this plan to subject the un-insured to the evil and greedy health insurance companies and their costly plans.


And what of expanding coverage for Medicare? Wasn’t Obamacare going to pay for itself, in part, by making upwards of $500 billion in cuts to Medicare? How is that going to work? How in the hell do you expand coverage while simultaneously cutting funding? Well, it works if services and treatments are rationed but we’ve all been assured that won’t happen.


Again, we go back to the basics when arguing with Obamacare proponents on the merits of Obamacare. Precisely, what are its merits? What is in this damn bill that should get anyone to support it? The “merits” of this bill appear, disappear and then re-appear on a weekly, even daily basis. Outside of a blind acceptance of the benevolence of our elected leaders which is tantamount to being teabagged by Obamacare, there is no logical reason to support this bill.

Great moments in the history of statism Pt. VI

The United States has the best health care in the world — but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

Worse, they are packed into a monstrous package without any regard to each other. The only thing linking these changes — such as the 118 new boards, commissions, and programs — is political expediency. Each must be able to garner just enough votes to pass. There is not even a pretense of a unifying vision or conceptual harmony.

That from Charles Krauthammer.

So, what about some of those inefficiencies? Here’s an email we got from Pops last week.

Our neighbor lady has a severe bladder problem which requires 6 weeks of daily IVs which can easily be administered by a visiting nurse at a cost of about $100 per day.

Oops, MediCare does not cover visiting nurses. But no problem - the lady can go to the hospital daily, hop into a bed for an hour, be serviced lunch and have her IV treatment. Cost: $1300 per day. $1300 x 7 x 6 =$54,600. Don’t you love it?

$54,600 vs. $4,200 to be exact.

Obamacare is essentially an gargantuan expansion of Medicare so how is then, that costs will be controlled with greater involvement of the government into your healthcare?

Unless the government starts intervening into personal healthcare decisions which they are poised to do, costs in Obamacare cannot be controlled. As the example above amply illustrates, it’s really as simple as that.

Not so random thought of the day

Precisely what is it about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, all of which are broke or are about to go broke that would suggest to anyone that Obamacare will not be in the same condition eventually?

Seriously. What?

Graphic of the day

(please click to enlarge)

Just a reminder to not trust the estimates made by the government with respect to healthcare programs which makes the CBO estimates regarding healthcare even more troubling.

And dig the Medicaid estimate vs. actual. Do you think its Sears Tower-like skyline-dominating presence might have something to do with the fact that two layers of government (federal and state) are involved with its administration.

H/T: Carpe Diem

A BwD Public Service Spot

President Obama on Wednesday declared that “the stars are aligned” to pass his health care agenda this year, with the legislation set to begin in the House of Representatives in July.

“We’ve got to get it done this year,” Mr. Obama said, standing on the South Lawn of the White House, surrounded by House Democratic leaders. “We’ve got to get it done this year, both in the House and Senate. We don’t have any excuses.”

For our community service for the week, we'll break out the decoder ring and translate the above statement from the President:

“We need to pass health care reform before too many people latch on to this whole deficit thing and the imminent collapse of Social Security and Medicare and start asking how the hell it is we are going to pay for this.”

And we loved this paragraph:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged to bring the legislation to the House floor by July, an ambitious goal considering the vastness and complexity of the nation’s health care system and the wide array of views on how the overhaul should work. She said the debate would begin before the Congressional recess in August.

Because nothing says debate, deliberation, judiciousness and wending one’s way through the admitted “vastness and complexity” of health care like throwing something together in 10 weeks time.

Pelosi gets yet another crack at putting together a multi-hundred billion (trillion?) piece of legislation. What could possibly go wrong?