In The Spotlight Blog

Peggy Noonan points out a problem with Obamacare. For one thing, it has crashed, and the crash is much more than just the website: "(Americans) understand a conceptual botch when they see one. They understand this new program was so big and complex and had so many moving parts and was built on so many assumptions that may or may not hold true, and that deals with so many people with so many policies—and they know they themselves have not read their own policies, for who would when the policies, like the law that now controls the policies, are written in a way that is deliberately obscure so as to give maximum flexibility to administrators in offices far away. And that’s just your policy. What about 200 million other policies? The government can’t handle that. The government can barely put up road signs. "The new law seems like just another part of the ongoing shakedown operation that is the relationship of the individual and the federal government, circa 2013."

Obamacare needs lots of young, healthy people to sign up – so they can be overcharged, to subsidize older people. Some commentators have hinted that this is problematic because young people tend to be uninformed about the law. Jeffrey Anderson in the Weekly Standard points out that learning more about the law probably won’t lure the young, however. The numbers make it plain how badly Obamacare cheats young people: "The findings are striking. Consider a 26-year-old (newly ineligible for Mom and Dad’s coverage) making $30,000 a year. Across these 50 counties, the average cost of the cheapest subsidized plan—the cheapest “bronze” plan—available to someone of that age from the Obama-care exchanges would be $2,134 a year. That’s roughly three times the cost of the cheapest plan this person could have bought pre-Obamacare, according to figures from the Government Accountability Office. Meanwhile, this 26-year-old’s taxpayer-funded subsidy, on average, would be $482, or just 23 percent of the premium. By contrast, a 61-year-old making that same $30,000 would, on average, get a subsidy of $4,018, covering 82 percent of the $4,885 premium for someone of that age.

Two senators have called for acting Homeland Security Inspector General Charles Edwards to resign amid allegations of misconduct and abuse of power by the official. Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who head the Senate subcommittee on financial and contracting oversight, said Wednesday they are planning a hearing to take place before the end of the year, and will find a replacement candidate to recommend to President Obama. "The position is too important to be left to partisan politics," Johnson said. The subcommittee is investigating nine claims against Edwards, including allegations of nepotism, withholding information about the Secret Service's Colombian prostitute scandal, using official resources for personal business, and requiring subordinates to do his homework for graduate school. The inspector general's office on Wednesday declined to comment on the matter.