You don’t say:
In his brilliant exposition of why sweeping policy changes often have unintended consequences, the late sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote that leaders get things wrong when their “paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes the consideration of further or other consequences” of their proposals. This leads policy makers to assert things that are false, wishing them to be true.
Which brings us to President Obama’s many claims about his health-care reform. Take his oft-expressed statement that if you like the coverage you have, you can keep it. That sounds good—but perverse incentives in his new law will cause most Americans to lose their existing insurance.
This was brought home to me when I asked the CEO of a major restaurant chain about health reform’s effect on his company, which now spends $25 million a year on employee health insurance. That will jump to at least $90 million a year once the new law is phased in. It will be cheaper, he told me, for the company to dump its coverage and pay a fine—$2,000 for each full-time worker—and make sure that no part-time employee accidentally worked 31 hours and thereby incurred the fine.
This reality is settling in at businesses across America. A Midwestern contractor told me he pays $588,000 for health insurance for 70 employees, contributing up to $8,400 a year for a family’s coverage. If he stops providing health insurance, he’ll pay $2,000 per employee in fines, and the first 40 employees are exempt from fines altogether.
It’s also dawning on employees that they will lose their coverage. Some will blame management; many more will blame those who wrote this terrible legislation.
Employees who lose coverage get to select a policy from a government-sponsored insurance marketplace called the “exchange.” This will be subsidized by taxpayers. Depending on his income, a worker will have to pay between 8% and 9.8% of the cost.
But there are a few hitches. Employers now pay for employee health plans with pre-tax dollars, but workers who buy into one on the exchange pay with after-tax dollars. Families making less than $30,000 and individuals making less than $15,000 a year will be dumped into Medicaid, widely viewed as second-class health care.
Either Mr. Obama was stunningly blind to these perverse effects when he promised people could keep their coverage, or he felt that admitting his plan would collapse employer-provided health coverage could keep it from passing. Either way—self-deception or deliberate deceit—health reform is going to turn out far differently than was promised. And because more workers will be dumped into subsidized coverage, taxpayers are likely to pay much more than the $1 trillion-plus price tag claimed by ObamaCare advocates for its first 10 years.
Well, maybe so.
But let’s not lose sight of what’s important here: everyone is going to covered (whether they like it or not)! And healthcare is now free!
The rest is just so many flies biting at the ankles of Historic Reform™. And in the end, no one will remember the buzzing of the flies — because flies die in short order, and what’s crucial here is that the groundwork has been laid for a glorious future of institutionalized Nannystate pragmatism, which will have taken the place of such antiquated notions as Natural Rights, religious faith, and individual autonomy (premised on a small and constrained government). Finally, the best people will be in charge of the rest of us.
Progress! God is dead. Long live the State.
— Just as about 52% of Americans seem to want it.
I’m going to stock up on ammunition and high explosives. In case I get cancer.
But… It was a HISTORIC reform! Just the thing to get lots and lots of progressives elected in ’12!
Honestly, these people make me despair for the species.
They’re repairing the species, mojo. QED.
The idea that “Obama’s plan” was in away shape or form actually Obama’s plan is kind of farcical… president bumblefuck’s only plan was to get his teleprompted dirty socialist Chicago street trash ass elected and hand America over for so Daddy Soros and a bunch of other cocksuckers could molest the shit out of it I think.
I’m bitterly clinging to the hope that a handful of states will have the balls to opt out. “No thanks, Washington — we’ll handle it ourselves.”
Meanwhile, the nurses’ union in the Twin Cities is threatening a strike against the hospitals, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they’ll be federalized in a couple of years, making any contract terms moot. Silly nurses!
FAIL: California Union Taking $700M in Public Money*
I’m just glad knowing 52% of the country isn’t RACIST!!!
I’m putting the over/under at losing my health insurance at April 2011.
The key thing with flies is the huge number of eggs they lay, the efficient work of the maggots, the better to consume the plentiful corpses.
The key thing with flies is the huge number of eggs they lay, the efficient work of the maggots, the better to consume the plentiful corpses.
Pigs are good with corpses.
FAIL: U.S. banks may end free checking accounts: report*
Hoping to be eaten last doesn’t always work out.
Yeah. I’m thrilled to go into work when the company webpage screams headlines like “JPMC expands Social Finance”, “Supporting Financial Reform”, and “World’s Largest Green Renovation”. Makes me feel so loved.
Comment by Squid on 6/17 @ 12:51 pm #
I’m bitterly clinging to the hope that a handful of states will have the balls to opt out. “No thanks, Washington — we’ll handle it ourselves.”
Somewhere in that pile they call “obamacare” lurks a “fuck you” clause—they’re saving the best for last!
Anyone know how to produce insulin outside of laboratory settings?
Just curious, is all. No real reason.
A trifle from Pete Wehner, making sport of the Democrat’s disconnect from the world, by means of E.J. Dionne who is a champion at and of disconnect.
So when these employees lose their health benefits, will their employers just bump their salaries by the amount they used to pay for the benefit? My bet is no, even though that is exactly what should happen.
I read a number of commentators who had Obamacare pegged as the three step method to implementing single-payer on the sly. The big stumbling block has always been getting the significant number of people who get group health coverage at work to buy into eating government cheese instead.
Step one – impose mandates and requirements that substantially increase the cost of employeer provided health insurance, while hampering private insurer’s ability to control their expenditures.
Step two – implement a government option that’s guaranteed to fail because it can’t absorb all the people who will be dumped by companies that realize providing health insurance is no longer cost effective.
Step three – after driving all private competitors out of the market, rescue the failed government option by changing it into a universal Medicare.
Those are ‘unintended consequences’, they were the plan all along.
Things aren’t so rosy in the precincts of the left. Which hey, schade.
nfreude?
Anyone know how to produce insulin outside of laboratory settings?
Most people I know use their pancreas, squid.
The thing to do is to have enough cash on hand to skip to China for medical care.
Not everyone will be able to afford this, but those who can’t (Peggy Joseph, I’m looking at you!) voted for Obama, so who cares?
The insulin thing was in Niven&Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer.
If I remember right, it involved sheep.
I’ve decided that the people who write the laws and vote them in are just not very bright. They are assuming that if they pass this law, everything else will remain static. Its the same mindset that thinks we need a 95% tax on millionaires. They will just keep making big money and we will continue to tax it at 95%, what could possibly change in that equation?
Insulin requires a steady supply of pancreases, and a blender. You can get more fancy than that and still call it your kitchen. Hog is better than cow, and I’m not sure about sheep, but anything is better than nothing. Human, of course, is ideal. Well, ideal except for the blood borne illness issues, but those typically won’t kill for years or maybe decades. A diabetic coma will take you out in less than a day.
Is anybody working on chimera that can turn the human stuff out renewably, say in an udder?
Well, call me an rubish, knucle-dragging, philistine, but I think this proves the suspicion that O!&Co are emloying the Cloward-Piven approach for attaining their goal of a single payer system.
And what will be the piece de resistance will be the whole explanation of how Obama never really said that you could keep your health care plan if you liked it.
I guess they’ll just say that it’s the eeeeevvollll business bosses that are causing you to lose your insurance; by not being willing bear the incredible expense of continuing to buy the government approved version of health care.
What’s really amusing is recalling that employer provided health care, the right that the lefties contend are as natural as those outlined by the founders of our nation, came about as a result of Roosevelt’s wage controls; employers used it to attract the best and the brightest in lieu of being able to actually pay them what they felt they were worth…
Some natural right there; a reaction to another progressive fascist’s command and control of the economy…
I would recommend getting any elective surgery that you might need done now. Hopefully, any chronic conditions you have will be treatable with generics (unfortunately for me, that isn’t the case right now), and that none of you was hoping for any new medications because that shit is right out.
I know they are working on a pill that will reduce arterial blockage and therefore reduce heart problems. Wouldn’t that have been a nice medication to have? Too bad it won’t be happening now.
Good article that shows the consequences of Obamacare are all predictable because we have Romneycare that plainly show the consequences:
5 painful health-care lessons from Massachusetts
http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/15/news/economy/massachusetts_healthcare_reform.fortune/index.htm