I’m sure there are folks who don’t understand why Libertarians rejoice at the total miserable failure of ObamaCare. Let me put it this way. We rejoiced when the Berlin Wall fell. Many of us were downright giddy when Pol Pot was arrested. I intend to host a Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup/Party on the night of Fidel Castro’s funeral. People who forcibly intervene in the lives and choices of adults do more harm than good. When they fail, society benefits. It really is that simple.
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No obvious sign of Obamacare being killed yet.
Even if it is I expect it will be resurrected. Ideas as bad as this need a stake through the heart and the head cutting off.
It’s when it goes kerplunk that sensible options can be explored
In my case, pyrrhic victory.
SO much damage in the wake of eternal vigilance.
Absolutely ALL of it foreseen and prophesized.
NOW,
I understand that SOME New Hampshire (USA) folk, as well as a certain internationally unpopular guest “news” buffoon (with an English accent) are STILL unconvinced about the whole Second Amendment (guns)thingie, despite recent re-re-re-reaffirmation, and will be reinterpreting what that really, really, really’ REALLY means again.
I know, I know, we do things bass ackward in the US. The familiar formula is SUPPOSED to be- disarm the public BEFORE imposing Facist enforced National Socialism, en route to Communisim (but uh.. let’s not call it THAT) um… for the women and children.
One more step to our Social Security Number (NOT an *ahem* OFFICIAL ID number, EXCEPT for Taxes, employment, banking, cell phones, “education”, drivers licensee, &al.)biometrically “tattooed” to
our “New World Order” footprint.
{/rant}
Crap, I forgot,
“..and NOW, actual medical care…” in my list of “unofficial” Social Security Number attachments.
Unfortunately this is one show where we have to wait for six generously avoirdupois endowed individuals to make sounds that will mark the end of the several acts.
I prefer outcomes that don’t involve cannibalism.
I too Antoine – we have both stood for reform (AGAINST collapse) for many years. However, the left (which the media and the education system) will not allow reform to take place – they are committed to their fantasy “Star Trek: New Generation” future where all basic goods and services are provided free by government.
So the choice of “reform to avoid collapse” may simply not be open to us.
After all look what is happening in the United States.
When Senator Susan Collins (am ultra moderate RINO) proposed that the debt limit be raised for six months to allow time for talks the Obama people (who control the Senate) said NO.
Think about that – they voted it down.
Not did not just reject Paul Ryan’s proposal (backed by the House) they rejected the proposal of Susan Collins also.
They want a showdown Antoine – because they believe that they can borrow and spend without limit (without any limit at all – the debt limit should be ABOLISHED, the Economist magazine last week, and the Economist magazine is not even Marxist it is just blinded by insane corporate welfare GREED – unlimited borrowing for ever means, in their minds, unlimited subsidies for their banker friends, for ever).
So we do not have a choice Antoine – we really do not. It takes one (not two) to make a quarrel.
They will not accept reform – not even ultra moderate reform.
The end of the present system is inevitable – they (not us) have made it inevitable.
Now the only question is what (if anything) will emerge from the chaos.
As for Obamacare…..
The “Affordable Healthcare Act” was never intended to reduce health care costs it was intended to INCREASE them.
Yes what is happening now was INTENDED – it was DELIBERATE and PREPLANNED.
The people who wrote the hundreds of pages of the “Affordable Healthcare Act” (who were NOT House and Senate members) were “Cloward and Piven” types who want collapse (the destruction of what they call “capitalism”)and craft policies with that aim in mind.
Sorry people but you are in the Paul Marks world now – welcome to the nightmares that have been with me for so many bitter years.
For now my nightmares are to be made flesh.
What? A government-sponsored and managed IT system, in some way connected with Healthcare, which doesn’t work?
Well colour me surprised.
Welcome to the world of tax-funded health systems, Americans.
Google “Stafford Hospital” if you want to find out what other joys await you.
Sadly Andrew the cultural elite in the United Kingdom blame the deaths at Mid Staffs on “the Tories” (even though Labour had been in power for many years at the time) and “spending cuts” – even though NHS spending had been vastly INCREASED.
Do you see why I believe the international intellectual and cultural elite (those who control everything from teacher training to the theatre) are beyond “in error” – they are EVIL.
They present (to the public) a picture of the world that they KNOW to be false – totally false.
I’m a little confused – so many people have been accessing the website, 2 months before the initial deadline, that the website failed. And that’s a sign of the failure of Obamacare?
PaulH:
The websites have been a failure from the first second they opened. I tried the site for one of my former states of residence and it was a complete waste of time. Might as well have been written by Crapita. Once in a blue moon I actually MISS parts of the USA, but not recently. And I am one of those who have a couple of real horror stories about the NHS, But comparing it to Obamacare, I’ll stay here in the UK.
I agree with Paul M. These people are far from incompetent, they are truly EVIL.
FlyingPig – I tried the main site, and the one for MN, on the day they launched. The main one worked fine for me straightaway, the MN one was entirely down for the morning, then came up and appeared to work fine in the afternoon (though I didn’t actually sign up, as I don’t live there!) Now if they are failing under the onslaught of literally dozens of enquiries I’ll agree that they’re failing, and badly. But my understanding is that the main site has had ~8 million hits, which is a formidable challenge that they were temporarily not up to. I don’t understand why that’s a sign of failure.
In Britain (and New Zealand and so on) private medical cover is highly regulated and (therefore) overpriced – but the level of regulations in the United States (even pre Obamacare) is far WORSE. And the “Affordable Healthcare Act” will make the level of regulations (mandates and so on) even worse still.
The time will come (indeed I think it has come already) when private health cover is less unaffordable in countries such as New Zealand than it is in the United States.
Tarrant County “That bastard Fidel is Dead” party?
I’ll bring pie.
As always, thanks for the link and the traffic and the discussion.
I’m always proud of seeing my little ol’ Texas Libertarian website in the Samizdata blogroll.
I wonder how long it will be before Medical Tourism is made illegal. Just to save us from those knaves and fools abroad who don’t wait for the FDA…
~8 million hits in 7 days, PaulH. That’s not a lot. As Glenn Reynolds pointed out, it’s only about an order of magnitude more than Instapundit and they spent more than £300m on it, which makes it one of the most expensive websites ever built. The fact is the thing was incredibly poorly designed. Browsers end up requesting and sending so many files to the server that it’s effectively running a DDOS attack on itself.
Of course, to follow up Paul M’s point, this may be the whole idea: look, health insurance is so hard, complicated, and expensive that it’d be much easier just to let the government take over the whole thing. Remember that this is an administration that deliberately spends more money than necessary during a government shutdown in order to make life difficult for people. Its MO is clear.
Sam – I’d say that’s actually quite a lot, for a site that had almost zero hits the day before. And what the site is doing is much more complicated than what Instapundit does (which is something the entire system can be criticized for, not just the website).
Nonetheless, none of this answers my initial question – why is a popular (something like top 30 by monthly impressions, though it’s a poor measure) site that wasn’t written well a sign of the failure of Obamacare?
Ellen, interesting point. I imagine that foreign travel insurance would become marvellously cheap for US residents, as it might be necessary to ban US residents from receiving paid-for medical treatment overseas as an anti-avoidance measure.
‘Wetbacks’ limping over the Rio Grande in search of illicit, cheap Mexican hospitals, like Soviet citizens dreaming of a trip to Finland during the Cold War?
PaulH
Amazon runs ~150 million hits a week and Facebook is in the ~4,000 million hits a week territory. Both of them maintain very complicated interactive databases with huge amounts of client specific information.
What kind of idiot or malefactor builds a website with the declared purpose of guiding the mandatory healthcare law compliance of nearly 1/3 of a billion people yet claims 8 million hits is anything more than pitifully disappointingly small? 8 million hits is less than 1 for every 40 of the people who are required to comply with this law. Many of those hits were probably just retries for crashed sessions.
The health care socialists had years and hundreds of millions of dollars to be ready. This isn’t a bug on roll-out. This is a non-delivery of anything even faintly resembling the promises.
@ Midwesterner, you appear to be describing a government programme almost anywhere.
However, if you can’t register (due to an inappropriate website), do you get fined by the IRS etc.?
The IRS is the enforcement arm. Presumably you will only get fined if you show up as a donor to Tea Party and Constitutionalist causes. They worked the bugs out of the partisan enforcement system in the last election cycle.
Midwesterner – How many hits did either of those sites get in their first week? And Amazon’s AWS had a 5-day outage a couple of years ago, was that a sign that AWS had failed?
“What kind of idiot or malefactor builds a website with the declared purpose of guiding the mandatory healthcare law compliance of nearly 1/3 of a billion people” – I don’t know, can you name such a site? My understanding is that the government site is intended to cover ~20% of the population, or around 3/50 of a billion people. Figure that half of them actually need to apply (the other half being family members), and that gives you 30 million people who actually need to register in the next 6 months, or about 167,000 per day. That’s still a big number, and I believe the current system isn’t getting close to that (and it’s likely to get worse given most people’s tendency to leave such things to the last minute). They undeniably should have done better. But again, why does this mean that the system is a “total, miserable failure”?
A minor point – this isn’t a “health care socialist” system, as they oppose it as being far too capitalistic. Not all authoritarianism is socialism.
PaulH,
If you take money from people from force, because you know best how to spend it on websites….
If you fine people for not signing up through your program, or someone else’s….
If you think that you can control all the tens of millions of individual choices better than everyone else, while looking down from the top….
Your f***ing website better work. Or I’ll call it a failure.
The Whited Sepulchre – Thanks, that’s an easier explanation to understand. So should I conclude that everything any government has ever done is a failure, because there have always been things that haven’t worked?
btw, by f***ing did you mean fucking?
PaulH – that would be right.
All government schemes end in failure – it is easy to check.
See what they say something will cost (when they are passing it) and then check what it actually cost.
By the way – if you are in favour of Obamacare get lost.
“Do you not believe in freedom of speech”?
I have the same high regard for the freedom of Obama supporters (and Fellow Travellers) that they have for mine.
The whole purpose of politics and hence of government is to reward failure, if people succeed and prosper, the they don’t need government. Politicians* promise unearned rewards, and the more vicious ones promise to penalise success. Some set out to penalise success and promise reward to those who set them on their way.
*We know that there are exceptions, more common than vegetarian hyenas.
PaulH,
Oh dear. You appear to be suggesting that there is the option of slowly growing into the system over a number of years incrementally. I missed that part of the law but as long and convoluted as it is, you may well be correct. Certainly the President appears to be unilaterally ignoring parts of the law he finds inconvenient.
Everybody (except Congress and senior Congressional staffers, they exempted themselves) is required to comply with the law. By long established US legal precedent, “ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.” The only way to be certain you are in compliance is to review the official source for rules (or take your employer’s word on faith). Just because the system only plans to initially assume the insurance plans of 64 million people, it does not exempt people from confirming they are in the 64 million category.
~320 million people must comply with the law. The majority are exempt from enrolling in a government managed plan although almost without exception their company plans will be changing dramatically and a rather large cascade of people are finding themselves no longer eligible for their company’s plan due to hour reductions or company downsizing. Guessing wrong on any point does not carry an exemption from compliance. An additional problem is that what is being enforced is continuously changing as the President picks and chooses what parts of the law he intends to enforce and which parts he intends to ignore.
If I sound more than a little paranoid about good faith attempts to comply with the law, back in the ’80s I made a sincere good faith attempt to comply with Dept of Agriculture rules and even requested and followed the advice of the agency I was dealing with. Oops. I was hit with a penalty equal to more than my net annual income and it took my congressman’s intervention to get it halved as a concession by that government department to my financial circumstances (and to my Congressman’s political muscle). I hope you’ll excuse a lot of people with similar experiences who don’t take MSM pontifications on whether they need to worry their little heads about AHA compliance.
Also (again, it is difficult to know for certain) there are many deadlines. October 1 is the first day of enrollment, December 15 is the deadline for coverages starting on January 1st, February 15 is the deadline to avoid incurring an IRS penalty, and March 31 is the deadline to apply for insurance before the next ‘window’. Miss that deadline, get sick in April, and tough luck, you cannot apply until next year with narrowly defined exceptions which have their own windows. October 15 is the start of Medicare open enrollment which concludes December 7. A great deal of revenue was removed from Medicare and transferred to Obamacare in order to get the numbers they advertized to push the healthcare takeover through congress but I don’t know yet how that is going to impact Medicare recipients. Only that there is a lot less available.
This is the most Obamacare friendly and simplistic description of the rollout that I’ve found or heard anywhere.
All insurance companies are forbidden from turning down applicants with preexisting conditions. Furthermore, underwriters are forbidden from applying actuarial methods to set premiums of applicants with preexisting conditions and instead must transfer the costs of preexisting conditions to healthy customers’ premiums. Without actuarial adjustment of premiums, it ceases to be insurance and becomes social redistribution of wealth (to each/from each, etc). I stand by my health care socialism description of the system.
You should also bear in mind that this healthcare implementation is an almost cliche form of national socialism, AKA fascism. In national socialist systems government allows businesses to operate only so long as they are operated in pursuit of the government’s goals. National socialism may not be communism, but it is still socialism.
ObamaCare is a putrid mess even if its mechanisms functioned.
But equating it to the imprisonment of entire nations (Berlin Wall), or the murder of over a million people (Pol Pot), or 50 years of brutal dictatorship (Castro)…
It seems to confirm that the libertarian perspective cam be very distorted.
Author Rich – author.
Hillary Clinton has a alibi – “I was close to Saul Alinsky – but I broke with him when I want to Yale”.
Barack Obama HAS NO ALIBI – he has been one of the Comrades all his life.
Obamacare is part of the “Cloward and Piven” Marxist approach (which Barack got directly from Francis Fox Piven in his Columbia days – although “moderate” Hillary also has links to Francis Fox Piven, but do not expect the media to report these links) to bankrupt and destroy “capitalist” America.
“But that is not same thing as supporting the Soviet Union Paul”
O.K. – then let us have a look at Barack Obama’s Columbia thesis on “Soviet Disarmament Policy”
Why is this thesis a secret?
Why is Barack’s whole life a “confidential” matter?
As far as the public are concerned (the people who were conditioned) into voting for him) Barack Obama appeared (fully formed) at the John Kerry Convention of 2004.
If this (the media presentation) is correct, then Barack Obama is nine years old – and thus not eligible for elected office.
As for Castro….
Is anyone going to pretend that Valerie Jarrett (and the whole inner circle of Obama people) are not supporters of the Cuban Revolution?
And (again) it is not just the Obama people.
Hillary Clinton’s man in New York City (to be elected Mayor in November – the media have already decided this) is a long term supporter of the Castro regime, and actively supported the Communists in Central America also.
Why do people suppose that someone would support Communist regimes all over the world and not (in their heart) wish to do the same things in the United States?
Midwesterner – Actually I’m thinking more that it can grow over the next few weeks, which is still more ambitious than any of the services you mentioned.. As I’ve already mentioned it would need to do that even if it was working 100% today, which it clearly isn’t. But I think that will be the real test – if it’s still massively underperforming say a month after launch then I’d consider it proof that the site (though not automatically the whole law) is fundamentally screwed, rather than just overwhelmed by demand.
Congress and staffers haven’t exempted themselves from the law, you should recheck your sources. They have (for political reasons, not surprisingly) tweaked the law as it applies to them, but in a way that doesn’t obviously favour or disadvantage them.
The new legislation is a burden, and as with anything that comes out of government it’s more complicated than it needs to be – that’s what the website should be helping with, and currently isn’t. If it starts to function correctly then it looks like it will make complying with this law easier than complying with most other laws. That’s a huge if, of course.
On the socialism thing: from each/to each is a communist ideal, as I understand it, not a socialist one, so not evidence of the socialism of the system. It does highlight that the ACA isn’t intended to provide insurance, it’s to provide healthcare. I’m constantly impressed by how many people don’t seem to understand the difference (not a dig at you – it’s primarily those on the left who don’t understand this). More significantly, business isn’t working to further the government’s goals, it’s working to further its own, which it has codified in law. The basic deal is “We will give you many millions of extra customers, without any limit to the amount of profit you can make outside of what the market will bear, but you have to charge everybody the same. Oh, and we’ll subsidise many of those customers to make sure they can pay you.” That seems like corporatism, not socialism.
Here’s a Politico article from 22nd September:
That’s the point: the idea that the government can do this sort of thing better than civil society has taken a severe hit. The Act mandated the creation of this website marketplace without any thought to practicalities. It was simply decreed that it should exist, and any misgivings were batted aside. That’s why it represents failure, even if, at some point in the future, it stumbles to its feet and lumbers towards some semblance of functionality (and there are plenty of leaks coming out about its creation to suggest that it is, in fact, fundamentally broken).
It’s typical statist thinking: passing a law is action, its effectiveness measured in spending, while implementation is a minor detail. Well, here we have the consequences of that: the law was passed, eye-watering amounts of money were spent, and the thing doesn’t work.
Hhmmm …
Considering the staggeringly huge increases in premiums for us mere mortals, increases that raise the tax burden of virtually everyone with a company plan, it exposes you completely when you say that a big tax break “doesn’t obviously favour” members of Congress. You are right about one thing though, it isn’t at all surprising. By your standards, what would it take to reach the level of obviously favoring them? Never mind. I suspect you are a troll and a waste of time.
Midwesterner – the reason they’re getting that tax break is because of the stupid political idea to force them into the ACA markets as some sort of ‘dog-fooding’ exercise. Without that they would (and should) have stayed on their existing, government provided plan, just the same as everyone whose employer provides coverage already. Because they’re forced to move, though, they would have suffered the loss of their existing subsidy, so in an attempt to even things up again they now get a subsidy approximately equal to what they were already getting before they started this foolish exercise. The net result is that they’re financially not significantly better or worse off, they’re just getting care through a private company rather than the government. I suppose you could argue that that’s a benefit for them, as they’re spared the horror of government health care. But ultimately it’s a lot of theatre that doesn’t really change anything.
I’m interested in the staggeringly huge increases in premiums, as I’m out of touch with how much policies cost now (a decade ago my family of four paid ~$600 per month gross for a good but not cadillac policy, but I understand it’s increased markedly since then). And finding comparable figures for a family under the ACA is beyond my googling skills.
I’ve been told I’m a troll a few times here. I can’t prove I’m not, of course, but I’m genuinely trying to expand my understanding of the libertarian viewpoint. It appears that for some here that if questions aren’t quickly followed by agreement it means you’re not worth speaking to. That seems an odd way of bringing others around to your point of view.
Your first paragraph shows that you don’t really understand what you are saying. Massive numbers of people are being pushed out of coverage by hour reductions. Home Depot drops health insurance for 20,000 part time employees and only gets a mention because of its size. It is happening at every company down to 50 employees and many that are close to that number are dropping employees to duck under the limit and drop employee coverage. My own mother lost her employer provided Medi-Gap early on in the process. The law says that employers must continue to provide whatever they are providing so a lot of companies early dropped benefits that they weren’t certain they could continue to provide in order to avoid being compelled to provide them during financial difficulties. This law hurts a lot of people.
All across the nation, Congress has forced millions to accept something they personally find too onerous to tolerate. Not only are they unwilling to accept the terms they are forcing on people who didn’t have employer provided insurance, they have created a system that appears designed to end, once and forever, employer provided insurance. And contrary to your misunderstanding, the lords of legislative kleptocracy are not going on to Obamacare but, to personally dodge the consequences of their hubris, have granted themselves a tax exemption on the already gold plated health insurance they gift themselves (with our money).
How Sculley manages to interpret the consequences he anticipates to be “positives” is an awe inspiring exercise in doublethink. This article contains a chart of data from a Congressional report of individual premium increases by state.
But the thing that pisses me off more than any other is that the law criminalizes medical privacy. Refuse to give your most personal details to a bunch of political partisan bureaucratic hacks, and you are declared a criminal and subjected to having your life destroyed. The IRS has fully demonstrated its willingness to use tax enforcement power as a political weapon to punish and destroy opposition. Now it turns out that they have transferred those practiced and proven political thugs to give them control of Obamacare information. Our medical information. If the idea of political hit squads having complete access to your personal medical records doesn’t ring alarm bells, you must have slept through the part of history that covered the great social experiments of the 20th Century.
Tangentially similar, I encourage you to reread 1984 and Brave New World.
I don’t like what some companies are doing in an understandable effort to protect their bottom line. That’s why your employer should have nothing at all to do with your health care. Sadly Obamacare doesn’t achieve that, which I’d count a great failure.
Again, I believe you misunderstand the conditions of Congress’s health care under the act. They currently get federal health care, at a very reasonable (but standard) rate. Are you saying that under the new law not only do they not have to interact with the ACA, but they’re giving themselves a further tax exemption on the federal insurance they already have? I’d like to see some evidence of that, because it’s certainly not what the Republican amendment that was passed as part of the ACA dictates.
Interesting figures on the premium rise – do you have anything not produced by a partisan group?
One thing that I agree with you entirely on is the objectionable idea of having “to give your most personal details to a bunch of political partisan bureaucratic hacks, and you are declared a criminal and subjected to having your life destroyed”. I had no idea that to get health insurance through the ACA you had to submit your full medical history to the government. I can see no reason for, nor defense of, that, though I’m surprised that it’s the case. Can you source that? In particular the bit where you have to hand over all this information even if you’re already on an employer plan, or declining to join the system and choosing to pay a fine instead?
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t need to reread either text – living in the UK under the NHS I already know that socialized medicine leads inexorably to complete state control over all aspects of an individual’s life, which is why I now have to ride my government-issued bike to my government-issued job, leaving behind my government-assigned family.
Paul Marks @ October 15, 2013 at 8:06 am:
Author Rich – author…
Barack Obama HAS NO ALIBI – he has been one of the Comrades all his life.
Obamacare is part of the “Cloward and Piven” Marxist approach … to bankrupt and destroy “capitalist” America.
Never assume malice where incompetence is sufficient.
There is a fetid “smash capitalism” miasma around the fashionable Left, including Obama and his cronies. But then also look at the number of those cronies who are billionaires. Look at the massive cronyism and profiteering among them. I live in Chicago, where Obama’s crony Emanuel is working to bust the teachers’ union (if they could only both lose) and handing out millions in public slush money to favored business interests. (Look up “TIF District”.)
These are “champagne Communists”, and like their predecessors, they have a managed cognitive split between their Red sentimentality and their actual positions as rich exploiters. (Though some have earned some of their wealth.)
If they were really as insidiously clever as all that, then the ObamaCare websites would work. They would want people to be able to buy into it.
Ignorance, corruption, incompetence, and sentimentality. Especially the last. That swine in New York should be universally shunned for his Castro fanboying. But it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow among the fashionable Left. Castro has been implicitly whitewashed. His crimes – huge, indisputable, and on-going – simply don’t exist for them. Only his romantic revolutionary image matters. (Neither affect them directly.)
Maybe I’m wrong, and it’s all a Communist Plot. But I find it hard to believe that the ultimate Bolshevik cell is full of hedge-fund managers, real-estate developers, investment bankers, currency speculators, and other multi-multi-millionaires.
Rich.
The man who won in 2008 and 2012 and passed the “Affordable Healthcare Act” (in the teeth of the opposition of most people) is not “incompetent”.
If you think he is some useless type who does not know what he is doing…….
He will bury you.
And I am not using a figure of speech.
As for the “Cloward and Piven” approach (and Obama’s connection to it – via Francis Fox Piven) that happens to be a matter of record.
You think it is a joke.
Another drunken Irishman like Fighting Joe McCarthy, or Irishman brought up by Jews like Andrew Breitbart.
Trouble is that things they said were TRUE.
And the things I am saying are TRUE.
Why do you not go and check for yourself.
RR
Many of those mentioned at the end may well prosper due to the Fed and cheap money. In a sound money environment they might find that entrepreneurs prosper by innovation and developing products, not asset price inflation, and having prospered under the current economy, they may support those who control it or are fashionable, some might have deep principles guiding their choices, some might be into short term gain.