In The Spotlight Blog

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%.
In the News: Blog 01/23/2014
The individual get-hacked mandate
Some things about Obamacare’s website seem to move quickly – such as how long it takes to access someone else’s information. Report in Gizmodo: “David Kennedy, a white hat hacker and TrustedSec CEO, has been warning anyone who would listen since November that the flawed government website was highly insecure. Now, after using passive reconnaissance, ‘which allowed [him to query and look at how the website operates and performs,’ Kennedy revealed that he was able to access 70,000 records in under four minutes, granting him access to information such as names, social security numbers, email addresses, and home addresses just to name a few. What's more, he didn't even technically have to hack into the website at all.” He explained to Fox News how it works:
In the News: Blog 01/23/2014
The economics don’t work
As many as six out of seven adults under age 35 would be better off skipping out of Obamacare’s health insurance mandate, according to research from the American Action Forum, a non-partisan think tank. That number falls if you factor out households that didn’t spend anything on health care and if you assign some peace-of-mind value to buying insurance. Still, in most scenarios, skipping the insurance and paying the federal penalty will be a better bet for most young adults, according to researchers at the think tank. Why? The bottom line: “Through its insurance market reforms and overly prescriptive benefit design, the ACA makes the decision to purchase health insurance more costly than it previously was for the vast majority of young adults, while at the same time significantly reducing the risks associated with the decision to go without coverage. Whether young adults make the decision to purchase health insurance will depend on many factors, but the perverse economics of the ACA discourages young adults from joining the health insurance system.”
In the News: Blog 01/22/2014
Improper payments, fraud and carelessness
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s “PolitiFact” operation claimed the other day that I made misleading statements about fraud in government benefits programs, spending 1,200 words parsing an off-the-cuff remark I made at Pints and Politics, a casual Friday evening get-together of conservatives in Waukesha. They called my remark “ridiculous.” I won’t comment on the paper’s news judgment. When someone asked me about how the IRS would enforce the penalties in the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, I pointed out the deficiencies in how the IRS enforces existing tax law: “Do you realize the average rate of fraud, whether it's in the Earned Income Tax Credit or Medicare or Medicaid, across the board, food stamps -- the average rate of fraud in those programs is 20 to 25 percent?”
In the News: Blog 01/13/2014
A just lawsuit over Obamacare
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is neither protecting patients nor making health care more affordable. It is doing real harm to real people and driving the cost of health care up, not down. Basic fairness dictates that members of Congress should be fully subject to the laws they impose on the rest of America. To sell a skeptical public on the promised wonders of Obamacare, the Democrat-controlled Congress made a big show of forcing members and their staffs off their Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan coverage and onto Obamacare-created plans. They wanted to appear happy to avail themselves of all the benefits of Obamacare and eager to comply with the letter of the law. But that was four years ago. As zero hour approached, they came down with a major case of buyer's (or should I say, seller's) remorse. That's when Senate Democrats started to panic and went running to President Barack Obama for relief.
In the News: Blog 01/12/2014
Obamacare tech problems move down the pipeline
The Los Angeles Times reports that people who bought insurance on the “Affordable” Care Act’s exchanges are now running into trouble with insurers handling the policies. Often, insurers can’t confirm coverage, they’re behind on answering questions or haven’t issued ID numbers. “Some insurers have begun to apologize this week, acknowledging a lackluster response amid an unprecedented surge of applicants,” the paper reports. “Industry officials say the disastrous launch of the federal exchange and the ever-changing rules from the Obama administration have complicated their job and contributed to the backlog.”
In the News: Blog 01/12/2014
The end of the college bubble, maybe
College enrollment is down, report Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhart in the Wall Street Journal, and it shouldn’t be a surprise. The pay premium that bachelor’s degree holders earn over those without a four-year college degree is shrinking, too, while the price of college is going up and up. They write: “This phenomenon leads to underemployment. A study I conducted with my colleague Jonathan Robe, the 2013 Center for College Affordability and Productivity report, found explosive growth in the number of college graduates taking relatively unskilled jobs. We now have more college graduates working in retail than soldiers in the U.S. Army, and more janitors with bachelor's degrees than chemists. In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do. “This is only partly the result of the Great Recession and botched public policies that have failed to produce employment growth. It's also the result of an academic arms race in which universities have spent exorbitant sums on luxury dormitories, climbing walls, athletic subsidies and bureaucratic bloat. More significantly, it's the result of sending more high-school graduates to college than professional fields can accommodate.”