Daily Archives: January 26, 2015

Attempts to Smear Obamacare Getting Lamer

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Having run out of cancer patients willing to lie about how Obamacare took away their treatments, the New York Post has found a young man claiming that Obamacare  refused to give him subsidized insurance when he couldn’t afford to pay the full premium. Except …

So there I was: A struggling grad student with no health insurance, and unable to afford unsubsidized ObamaCare plans I’d hardly, if ever, use.

But Uncle Sam was there on his white horse, ready to save my day with . . . Medicaid?

Yes, folks, his state (Illinois, I believe) was ready to sign him up for Medicaid, but because he is eligible for Medicaid he can’t buy other insurance on the exchanges. And apparently he is too special to accept Medicaid. Which I am on myself right now, btw, at the state of New York’s insistence. I got two prescriptions filled last week for just a $1 copay. Works for me.

But let us return to this unfortunate young man, who feels it is beneath him to accept Medicaid, but doesn’t want to pay for the other alternatives available to him.

Reading on, we learn that Precious was 26 years old and in graduate school when he learned the group plan he was on as a student was being discontinued for some bullshit reason, probably because the school administration realized it could save itself some money by dumping the insurance plan and blaming the ACA. But Precious is too special to accept Medicaid, because it would give him cooties, and private plans are more expensive than group plans, and he is being ripped off because he is young and healthy and has to pay more because he’s being dumped into the same risk pool as old, sick people.

Precious then claims his only option was to take short-term insurance which he realizes is a ripoff, but Obamacare gave him no choice. Well, except for Medicaid, but that’s not really an option for someone as special and precious as he is.

My experience perfectly highlights the insanity of the Affordable Care Act. It forced me — a paying, insured, well-educated, healthy American — out of the coverage I’d had, then tried to push me into Medicaid.

The program wouldn’t let me pay more when I offered to pay a higher rate to stay out of Medicaid, and it provided only one other option: paying the highest rate available for insurance I didn’t use once in 2014.

Which means he wouldn’t have used Medicaid, either, so he wouldn’t have gotten cooties after all.

Rather than take the easy route and enroll in Medicaid, I paid my own way with a private plan of my choosing. Now, instead of being rewarded for saving taxpayer money, I’m being punished with a fine of at least $95. What a country!

The punch line is the author’s bio at the end of the article: “Justin Haskins is a writer and editor for The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market think tank.” I bet he’s read Atlas Shrugged three times.

Greece Taken Over by Greeks

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The elites of Europe made a mad dash for their smelling salts yesterday when the Greek people rebelled against the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission and elected politicians who promised to govern Greece for the benefit of Greeks, which of course is a crazy far-left radical idea that no sensible elitist would approve. The new members of Parliament and their new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, ran on an anti-austerity platform that proposed the Greek people shouldn’t have to suffer for the sins of international finance.

Headline at the Wall Street Journal:

Greece Must Repay Debt, Europe Officials Say

Some Officials Concerned Syriza’s Election Win Could Encourage Other Antiausterity Movements

Ya think?

Krugman points out in his column today that the austerity measures crammed down Greece’s throat not only caused untold hardship for Greeks but left the country deeper in debt.

What went wrong? I fairly often encounter assertions to the effect that Greece didn’t carry through on its promises, that it failed to deliver the promised spending cuts. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, Greece imposed savage cuts in public services, wages of government workers and social benefits. Thanks to repeated further waves of austerity, public spending was cut much more than the original program envisaged, and it’s currently about 20 percent lower than it was in 2010.

Yet Greek debt troubles are if anything worse than before the program started. One reason is that the economic plunge has reduced revenues: The Greek government is collecting a substantially higher share of G.D.P. in taxes than it used to, but G.D.P. has fallen so quickly that the overall tax take is down. Furthermore, the plunge in G.D.P. has caused a key fiscal indicator, the ratio of debt to G.D.P., to keep rising even though debt growth has slowed and Greece received some modest debt relief in 2012.

Other commenters are skeptical that the new government can deliver what it promises, for a variety of reasons. But as Krugman says, ” in calling for a major change, Mr. Tsipras is being far more realistic than officials who want the beatings to continue until morale improves.”