Op-Eds and Blogs

In the News: Blog 02/7/2014
We've got a bill to do that, Mr. President
President Obama wants to give a little more life to his jury-rigged effort to let people keep health care plans they liked. The Associated Press reports that the administration “is considering an extension of the president's decision to let people keep their individual insurance policies even if they are not compliant with (Obamacare).” The press reports that the president may be looking to extend the carve-out for up to three years: “Health and Human Services spokesman Joanne Peters confirmed that the issue is under discussion, saying: ‘We are continuing to examine all sorts of ways to provide consumers with more choices and to smooth the transition as we implement the law. No decisions have been made.’”
Op-eds 02/5/2014
The Hill: Congress, not the FCC, should set Internet policy
<b>Originally published in The Hill, February 2nd, 2014</b> Today, Americans access broadband Internet almost everywhere. We are using it to talk, view, tweet, post and pin at home, at work, in our cars and on the move. As much as broadband is changing the way we live, it also challenges the decades-old assumptions behind the regulation of communications networks in the United States. For years, the federal government regulated telecommunications providers as if confining them to lanes on a racetrack: one lane for traditional telephone service, another for wireless and yet another for cable. Each lane was assigned different rules by the government because it came along at a different time, operated with a different business model and utilized service-specific technologies.
In the News: Blog 02/5/2014
Obamacare discourages work
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that the ridiculously misnamed “Affordable” Care Act will reduce work. As the agency itself said of Obamacare: “By providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income) and by making some people financially better off, the ACA will create an incentive for some people to work less.” The Wall Street Journal put it this way: “A key factor is people scaling back how much they work and instead getting health coverage through the Affordable Care Act. . . . Some workers might decide they were better off working fewer hours because a smaller paycheck might qualify them for Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income Americans that some states are expanding under the health law, while other workers might eye the law's income-based subsidies toward the cost of private insurance premiums and decide to change their hours to affect their eligibility. Meanwhile, higher-income workers whose tax rates were increased to help pay for the law may also choose to work less, the CBO said.”
In the News: Blog 02/3/2014
President Obama says he was clueless (about Healthcare.gov)
President Obama now says he had no idea that Obamacare’s rollout was going to be such a disaster: “On the rocky launch of the health care exchange system, Obama said he anticipated problems with the rollout of ObamaCare in October, particularly with the HealthCare.gov website because computer programs have glitches. “ ‘But neither I nor anybody else anticipated the degree of problems with HealthCare.gov,’ he said.” This isn’t exactly true. Plenty of people knew that the system was nowhere close to ready.
In the News: Blog 01/31/2014
Higher pay, but only if you keep your job
resident Obama wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. “Give America a raise,” he demanded of employers in his State of the Union speech, telling them, “Americans will support you” as their labor costs – and their products’ prices – shoot upward. The president claimed this was a matter of helping poor families. The numbers, however, show that very few families must get by on minimum wage. Only 2.8% of all workers earned the minimum wage in 2012, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, and more than half of those were under 25 years old. A quarter were teenagers. New 2013 Census data from economist Keith Hall at the Mercatus Center shows how most minimum wage workers are far from the heart-wrenching straw man that the president deploys:
In the News: Blog 01/29/2014
Obamacare even more repellent to Wisconsinites
Back in October, when Obamacare was a freshly launched disaster, I said that the website problems were only the beginning. The new Marquette University Law School poll suggests that Wisconsinites see it that way, too. Right Wisconsin reports: “The poll found that support for Obamacare is underwater by a stunning 21 points. Support for Obama's signature domestic achievement has dropped to just 35 percent, with 56 percent of voters now saying they disapprove. In October, in the immediate wake of the botched roll out, 42 percent had supported the health care reform while 48 percent had disapproved.”
In the News: Blog 01/27/2014
I’ll listen respectfully
In the News: Blog 01/27/2014
Ominous signs for Obamacare
Obamacare’s backers keep on claiming that it’s not a government takeover because private insurers are involved. But it’s not clear how at set-up will fare. According to The Hill (hat tip to Right Wisconsin): “Moody’s announced Thursday it was downgrading its outlook for health insurers from stable to negative based on uncertainty related to ObamaCare. . . . “ ‘While we’ve had industry risks from regulatory changes on our radar for a while, the ongoing unstable and evolving environment is a key factor for our outlook change,’ Moody’s Senior Vice President Stephen Zaharuk said in a statement. ‘The past few months have seen new regulations and announcements that impose operational changes well after product and pricing decisions were finalized.’ ”
In the News: Blog 01/23/2014
Why Target is dumping its employees
Target, the discount store, is ending health coverage for its part-time workforce, citing the Orwellian-named "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", or Obamacare. The company will offer one-time $500 payments and guide employees through the process of using Obamacare exchanges. The company says few of its part-timers, about 10%, sign up for health coverage now. What’s striking is the rationale the company gives for dumping even those people onto the dysfunctional exchanges. According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
In the News: Blog 01/23/2014
The website is bad, the economics are terrible
The Wall Street Journal points out the problem with the “Affordable” Care Act that’s far worse than malfunctioning websites: The plan’s economics are totally dysfunctional. “For the first time HHS also disclosed data about the demographic mix on the exchanges and the types of plans people are choosing. In rational insurance markets this wouldn't matter because people would be charged premiums roughly proportional to their expected health risks. But ObamaCare's regulations require younger and healthier people to be overcharged in the name of equity and income redistribution, and if they don't report for duty then rates will surge over time. “Age is a crude actuarial proxy for health status, and merely 24% of enrollees are between ages 18 and 34. ObamaCare's economics needs that to rise to about 40% to achieve a critical mass. Enrollment also skews heavily to people 55 to 64 years old, at 33%.