STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Monday, 23 December 2013

[Demeter]

5. Obama Exempts “If You Like It You Can Keep It” Cancelees from the Individual Mandate

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/12/obama-exempts-like-can-keep-cancelees-individual-mandate.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29



In a six-part series on “ObamaCare’s relentless creation of second-class citizens,” I showed how people seeking health care through ObamaCare’s exchanges get randomly varying access to care because of age, geography (state and county), income, employment status, banking status, internet access, existing insurance status, language, demographics, and by CMS marketing category (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. In addition, people “on the bubble” for income eligibility are incentivized to corrupt the system by gaming it.) These variations are in great contrast, both morally and economically, to single payer’s “everybody in, nobody out” model. None of these variations are in any way fair, or encourage equal access to health care, which Obama seemingly concedes is a right; they exist solely because of Obama’s determination to preserve the private insurance industry’s actuarial model, even though the private insurance industry is a wholly parasitical, rent extracting tapeworm on the body politic. All this would be true even the supposedly tech savvy Obama political operation had not turned healthcare.gov into the debacle it has been.

Be that as it may, the administration has now added yet another whimsical and arbitrary misfeature to Obama’s “signature domestic initiative.” David Lauter of the LA Times explains why some people who were going to Pain City are now going to Happyville!

Under the new policy, people who have received notices that their health plans are being canceled would qualify for hardship exemptions allowed by the law. Under those exemptions, they could buy low-cost catastrophic health plans or skip buying health coverage altogether.

It’s worth noting that the rule change was not motivated by public policy, but — and I know this will come as a surprise to you — purely by political considerations.

The new policy stems from one of the biggest political problems Obama has faced with the troubled rollout of the healthcare law — his promise that the people who liked their existing health plans could keep them. When several million people nationwide began receiving notices that their plans would be canceled because the plans fell short of the new law’s requirements, Obama suffered a sharp drop in public trust.

Democrats in Congress, especially senators facing tough reelection challenges next year, were bitterly upset at the predicament in which Obama’s words had placed them. They have pressured the administration to respond to angry constituents.

Why is this important? (Consumer Reports, disgracefully, simply uses the story as click bait for its eligibility calculator.) Because the key feature of ObamaCare is “the marketplace” (the exchanges) and the individual mandate that forces people to buy products from that market, in order to guarantee the health insurance industry customers for the foreseeable future. But this new hardship exemption blows a hole in the mandate. Reuters:

In the law, there are 14 categories of “hardships” that can be used to get an exemption from the mandate to buy insurance, such as a recent eviction or bankruptcy. But this is the first exemption prompted by the administration’s botched rollout of the law, and comes after months of insistence that there would be no delays in implementing the individual mandate.

No delays except for everybody and his brother who already got a delay, like employers, small businesses, health insurance companies, name it. Everybody but you. Until now! Again, needless to say, this delay is has no coherent basis whatever in ethics or policy. Even Ezra Klein is aghast:

A 45-year-old whose plan just got canceled can now purchase catastrophic coverage. A 45-year-old who didn’t have insurance at all can’t. Why don’t people who couldn’t afford a plan in the first place deserve the same kind of help as people whose plans were canceled?

Why, it’s almost like people who might cause Democrats electoral problems are a protected category, isn’t it? If lack of coverage for enough people like you makes Obama look bad, you’ve got a hardship. You’re a winner, and you get a ticket to Happyville! See how simple Federal rule-making can really be? Here’s how the exemption works, according to WaPo:

2. According to HHS, the exemption covers people who “experienced financial or domestic circumstances, including an unexpected natural or human-caused event, such that he or she had a significant, unexpected increase in essential expenses that prevented him or her from obtaining coverage under a qualified health plan.”

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TO CALL IT POLITICAL HYPOCRISY IS TO BEG THE QUESTION. I THINK WE'VE DESCENDED RIGHT INTO MADNESS: LOOKING GLASS, CHESHIRE CAT MADNESS.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A PRESIDENT HAS NO ETHICS, MORALS, OR SCRUPLES WHATSOEVER.