Is measles an existential threat?

Head of the Centers for Disease Control Tom Frieden has come out against the media hysteria in response to some parents who do not want to vaccinate their children:

"While the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature we confronted during the polio epidemic or during the Spanish Flu of 1918. We cannot afford to be buffeted by alarmism in a nearly instantaneous news cycle."

It is so refreshing to hear common sense from Obama administration officials in the midst of all of the piling on of the mainstream media on parents who ... Um, hang on here. I'd better check my facts first ... Let's see ... um, okay. Let me correct myself.

Actually this wasn't the head of the CDC talking about vaccination, but National Security Advisor Susan Rice talking about ISIS. And it was not the polio and Spanish flu epidemics she referred to, but World War II and the Cold War.

Other than that, the quote above is entirely accurate.

Never mind.

The Twelve Days of Obamacare

HT: AEI Ideas

The Democrats Deadly Dilemma: Why Obama and his Democratic allies are doomed

President Obama has committed the one unpardonable political sin: embarrassing your friends.

So far he has gotten away with anything he wanted no matter how much it cost the country. But now it is not just costing the country; it is costing his political allies. You can do just about anything in politics but that.

And because of this they are fleeing the sinking political ship like rats. Today, 39 Democrats broke ranks to vote for a Republican-sponsored bill that would do what Obama said he wanted to do in his speech yesterday (and what he promised before Obamacare was passed): keep your current health care policy.

But Obama says he is going to veto it if it comes to his desk. Why would the President veto a bill that would ensure that insurance companies could do what he promised they could do yesterday?

There is a very simple answer to this question: Although he wants to appear as if he wants insurance companies to be allowed to do this, he doesn't really want them to do it.

If insurance companies continue to offer the same health policies they offered before, then fewer healthier people will join the exchanges. And if they fewer healthier people don't join the exchanges, then, because of the high percentage of high-risk participants, rates on policies purchased through the exchanges will increase.

In other words, the very success of Obamacare depends on the success of driving people now insured through the individual market into the exchanges. But it also depends on people being able to keep their policies like Obama said they would.

In other words, the two criteria necessary for Obamacare to succeed are mutually exclusive:

If people are allowed to keep their current policies, then rates will increase, which will doom Obamacare. If, on the other hand, people are not allowed to keep their current policies, then they will rebel, which will also doom Obamacare. Since either people will be allowed to keep their current policies or they won't, either rates will increase or people will rebel. In either case, Obamacare is doomed.

There does not appear to be any way around the horns of this dilemma. In fact, something even worse is likely to happen.

In fact, the pressure of this dilemma has been to increase even more by the failure of the Obamacare website. What the failure of the website has done is bring about the worse possible outcome of the President's health care legislation. In most dilemmas, you are forced to make a choice between two unacceptable alternatives--in this case raising health care insurance rates or making people angry by throwing them off the plans you told them they could keep.

What the failure of the website has done is ensure that the President and his Democratic allies are impaled, not on one horn of the dilemma or the other--but on both of them.

Because of the technical problems that are preventing people from signing up for health care, it is everything but an absolute certainty that people will not get back their cancelled policies. Under the Presidents plan--and the Republican bill passed today--insurers are not required to keep offering these policies and there is no incentive for them to continue to offer them.

In addition, it will be almost impossible for the exchange to sign up enough people to keep rates low, even if the site is fixed before the end of this month--another promise Obama made which he cannot keep.

And the timing of things couldn't be worse for Democratic congressmen: The announcements of rate increases will arrive next September or October, right before mid-term elections.

High rates and lack of choice. Oh, and one more thing, because of the inauspicious timing of the Obamacare schedule, many people will be without health care policies on January 1, when, under Obamacare, they are required to have them.

If this political coffin needed another nail, there it is.

I'm trying to think of what is going on right now in the minds of those people who predicted just a week or so ago a drubbing of the Republicans at the polls next year because of the threatened government shutdown. In fact, does any even remember that now?

Obamacare website Hell

A lady describes her experience signing up online:

...I tried again, was able to get on and was then told that I needed to authenticate my identity.  I was asked several questions such as “What town did you live in when you lived on Pinewood?”  Three of the four questions, while going back 18 years ago, were reasonable and I was able to answer.  Then we came to a fourth question – “In the past you purchased veterinary insurance for your pet…What was the name of the pet?”  I answered “none of the above” because I NEVER purchased health insurance for my pet(s).  Since I answered “none of the above” I was given another question…”What was your former telephone number?”  All the answers were for area code 803.  I never lived in area code 803 and had to look it up on the internet.  I never lived in the state.  So…I could go no further.  I called the Center and they told me that they were having systems issues and to try back.

Read the rest here.

Obamacare in one sentence

Here is Dr. Barbara Bellar, an Illinois state senate candidate, summing up Obamacare:

So let me get this straight: ... We're going to be gifted with a health care plan we are forced to purchase, and fined if we don't, which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but which provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it (but exempted themselves from it), and signed by a President who smokes, with funding administered by a Treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before the benefits take effect, by a government which is already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke.

HT: Catholicvote.org

What could possibly go wrong with Obamacare?

HT: Carpe Diem:

Sauce for the Gander: Are liberals going to get a taste of their own medicine on Obamacare?

It appears the Obama administration didn't fare too well in the oral arguments on Obamacare yesterday, what with justices asking mostly critical questions and Obama's solicitor general choking in broad daylight in the most high profile case before the highest court in the land.

"This was a train wreck for the Obama administration," Toobin said Tuesday. "This law looks like it's going to be struck down. I'm telling you, all of the predictions, including mine, that the justices would not have a problem with this law, were wrong."

So points out Maggie Gallagher.

So ... Go through the hard slog of getting a law passed (like, say, Proposition 8 in California) only to have progressives go to court and get it struck down on the grounds it offends some radical new norm no author of our Constitution would recognize. 

Since at least 1973, when Roe v. Wade struck down anti-abortion laws in all 50 states, progressive elites have looked on the Supreme Court as their wholly owned subsidiary -- a trump card only they get to play. 

The Supreme Court's job, in their view, is to strike down popular laws supporting traditional moral norms -- especially sexual norms -- that progressives would have trouble winning at the ballot box. The discovery and invention of new rights, from abortion to gay marriage, was their turf, their "Get Out of Democracy Free Card." 

Or so they thought. 

... Now, liberal Democrats are looking straight into the abyss of a world where courts can step in and take away what they fought hard for at the ballot box. 

Perhaps they will suddenly develop a little sympathy for the conservative half of the country whose laws and norms they go to court to throw out? 

Don't count on it.

Read the rest here.

Does the Catholic prohibition on contraception make sense?

Those protesting the Obama administration's directive forcing Catholic institutions to provide their employees with contraceptives against the religious teachings of Catholicism are careful to point out that your view on whether the Obama administration is right is distinct from what you believe about the Catholic position on birth control.

At the same time, it's not a bad time to say something about the Catholic position on birth control. It is probably the ethical position most at odds with the modern utilitarian view of morality, and it makes no sense if you don't understand the central principle of Catholic ethics in general.

The central principle of Catholic ethics is that it is teleological. If you don't get this, then most Catholic ethical positions will make no sense at all.

There are basically three kinds of ethical systems. The first is consequentialist: an action is right if it produces good effects. Utilitarianism is the most widely known kind of consequentialism. The second is deontological: an action is right if the intension is to act in accordance with ethical rules. Immanuel Kant's ethics is considered a paradigm case of deontological ethics.

The third school of ethical thought, that to which Catholics are at least supposed to adhere, is teleological. What does it mean to say that Catholic ethics is "teleological"? The word comes from the Greek word telos, meaning, roughly, "purpose." This is widely known today as "virtue ethics," a view of human actions that is based on an Aristotelian-Thomistic view of reality. In modern times this view has been championed most notably by G.E.M. Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre. In fact, MacIntyre's book After Virtue is one of the most important and influential philosophy books to have come out in the last 50 years, and is almost single-handedly responsible for the contemporary revival of virtue ethics.

MacIntyre makes the case that, since the rejection of the Aristotelian-Thomist worldview during the so-called Enlightenment, teleological ethics has largely been abandoned in favor of various consequentialist and deontological views of ethics that have largely failed for a variety of reasons. And this, in turn, is the result of the rejection of two of Aristotle's four cases: formal cause, which the intrinsic pattern inherent in every thing, and final cause, which is the inherent purpose (telos) in every thing, and is aligned implicitly in each thing to that things formal cause.

The only coherent system of ethics, MacIntyre argues, is teleological.

Ethics in the teleological view is very simple. There are men as we find them in the world and men as they would be if they fulfilled their telos. Ethics is the best way to get from the first to the second.

Furthermore, because formal and final causation are rational concepts, virtue ethics yields a rational ethical system, one which short-circuits the fact/value distinction that plagues every other ethical system. There is no fact/value distinction in Catholic ethics, since ethics is itself a rational system.

Catholic ethics then, being teleological, is based on purpose. But more specifically, it is based on the intrinsic purpose in natural things, most importantly in man. If you look at the list of Catholic ethical positions, it will make sense only if you understand this.

This is particularly evident in sexual ethics. In Catholicism, a sexual act, like any other act, is judged right or wrong according the telos implicit in the act. The telos of the sexual act is reproduction. If the sexual act is performed in conflict with this purpose, or if the purpose the act is somehow interfered with, then it is wrong.

This is why the Catholic Church is opposed to contraceptives: They interfere with the intrinsic purpose of the sexual act.

Now as soon as you say this, you get rhetorically jumped by people who either don't understand teleological ethics or don't agree with it. They either argue that reproduction is not the only purpose of the sexual act or that no act has any intrinsic purpose and that the purpose of any act is whatever the doer has in mind.

As to the first kind of response, the usual argument is that pleasure is obviously a purpose of sex, and therefore reproduction is not the only purpose. But the argument that reproduction is not the only purpose of the sexual act is irrelevant, since it is not the position of the Catholic Church that it is. The Catholic position is that reproduction is the primary purpose and other purposes are subordinate to it.

It is also irrelevant because the argument confuses the natural purpose of a thing and it's extrinsic, human purpose. As Catholic philosopher Edward Feser has put it:

It is also irrelevant that people might indulge in sex for all sorts of reasons other than procreation, for I am not talking about what our purposes are, but what nature's purposes are, again in the Aristotelian sense of final causality. Now it is true of course that sexual relations are also naturally pleasurable. But giving pleasure is not the final cause or natural end of sex; rather, sexual pleasure has as its own final cause the getting of people to engage in sexual relations, so that they will procreate.

In other words, of course there are other purposes to sex than procreation, but they themselves only serve to enhance the primary purpose.

Then, as we said, there is the argument of those who don't think anything has any intrinsic purpose at all. This is the real objection, and, in fact, the people who argue that sex has some purpose other than procreation really don't believe in intrinsic purposes at all, anyway, even though they sometimes talk as if they do.

If you take this position--and reject all formal and final causes in nature--then you are left with the position that the heart is not for pumping blood, and the kidney is not for filtering the blood, and teeth are not for chewing, and the brain is not for controlling the rest of the body.

Just be glad doctors don't believe this--or at least that they don't act as if they did.

Under this view, nothing, in fact, is for anything.

And if you take this position, you are, of course, in the strange predicament of saying that the reproductive organs are not for reproduction.

It's not a position I would want to defend.

The rising price tag for Obamacare

The price tag for Obamacare just went up. Here's the Wall Street Journal on the Congressional Budget Office's new report:

What's $2.3 trillion among friends? That's the canyon between the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of a $9.5 trillion federal budget deficit over the next decade under White House proposals, and the White House's own estimate of $7.2 trillion. The discrepancy emerged in a CBO analysis released Friday, not that it got much media attention.

Keep on believin'!

Will this health care bureaucracy be more efficient?

How Obamacare works:

Now, raise your hand if you think this is going to make our health care system more efficient...

Right to Life of KY responds on Obamacare

Michael Janocik of Right to Life of Kentucky takes on a response to his original letter in the Louisville Courier-Journal on Obamacare:

My sympathy and prayers go out to C. Stone, who lost her young husband to cancer. In her rebuttal to my letter in the Louisville Courier-Journal, "Obamacare Leads Us Down a Dangerous Path," Stone rightly points to serious flaws in the current third-party private health insurance market. Most Americans believe we can do better and I applaud Mrs. Stone for her contribution to do so on behalf of her husband and others. The point of my CJ letter is that Obamacare will exacerbate, not alleviate, the problems with which we are all too familiar - the denial or hindrance of health care coverage by third party payers.

Notwithstanding Stone’s helpful criticisms, her rebuttal actually affirms my argument. Stone writes: "Janocik, assistant director of Right to Life Educational Foundation of Kentucky, and his ilk continue to spout these "death panel" threats and continue to obscure what health care reform is all about. Can we please quit terrifying people?” Nary a handful of keystrokes click by before she writes, “I do agree with his comment that ‘when third-party, unaccountable bureaucracies control health care decisions, rather than patients and physicians, involuntary rationing is the inevitable result, with involuntary euthanasia not too far behind’,” citing the role that private insurance played in denial of care for her husband.

To redress that denial of coverage, Stone wrote she was able to pay for care above and beyond what her insurance covered. That is true and that is precisely one of the freedoms, among others, that Obamacare will abolish - Stone’s ability to purchase health care treatment beyond the scope of her government-approved insurance policy.

It seems counter-intuitive then, that Stone would defend health care legislation that would, by her own acknowledgment, 1. ) further concentrate power to deny health care coverage within one federal bureaucracy, rather than within hundreds, if not thousands, of private insurers and, 2.) deny her the means by which to pay for additional medical care for her husband that will not be covered by “universal health care.”

Stone’s exegesis of the current health care failings seems well-informed by her personal challenge to do right by her beloved husband. Perhaps her perception of the solution, however, is clouded by same.

Michael Janocik
Assistant Director
Right to Life Educational Foundation of KY

Gallup: Americans worried about Obamacare

According to a new Gallup Poll, Americans aren't buying into the hype on Obamacare:

One week after the passage of historic new healthcare legislation, Americans remain worried about the bill's effect on costs -- both for the nation as a whole and for them personally. A majority of Americans say healthcare costs in the U.S. and the federal budget deficit will get worse as a result of the bill. Half of Americans believe that healthcare costs for themselves and their families will get worse.

I'm quite frankly surprised it is still doing this poorly in the polls. I expected all the victory celebrations to make Americans feel good about the health care medicine they've just been prescribed. This should put a little more steel into the backbone of the national Republicans--with the emphasis on "should."

HT: WorldwideStandard.com

Choosing your poison: Another benefit of Obamacare

Another practitioner of the dismal science spouting doom and gloom. Apparently Robert Samuelson, an economics writer for Newsweek and the Washington Post, hasn't gotten that memo about all the money Obamacare is going to save us and thinks it could end up pushing us over the financial cliff:

When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody's Investors Service--the bond rating agency--published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama's health care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.

...For two years, Obama and members of Congress have angrily blamed the shortsightedness and selfishness of bankers and rating agencies for causing the recent financial crisis. The president and his supporters, the historians will note, were equally shortsighted and self-centered -- though their quest was for political glory, not financial gain.

Let's be clear. A "budget crisis" is not some minor accounting exercise. It's a wrenching political, social and economic upheaval. Large deficits and rising debt -- the accumulation of past deficits -- spook investors, leading to higher interest rates on government loans. The higher rates expand the budget deficit and further unnerve investors. To reverse this calamitous cycle, the government has to cut spending deeply or raise taxes sharply. Lower spending and higher taxes in turn depress the economy and lead to higher unemployment. Not pretty.

Is the guy just not checking his box at the office? Read the rest here.

HT: Bluegrass Bulliten

More money saving ideas from Obamacare

Mark Steyn takes note of another provision hidden in Obamacare: a stiff tax on corporate drug plans for retirees. The last time we created an entitlement was the 2003 drug benefit that gave companies a 28 percent tax break for such plans. But with the new tax, much of that benefit goes away:

If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company’s costs “will increase in the short term.” And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription-drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far just three companies -- Deere, Caterpillar, and Valero Energy -- have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. There are an additional 3,500 businesses presently claiming the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we’re roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees.

Just keep saying to yourself: "This is saving us money, This is saving us money..."

Will Obamacare lead to new, hidden taxes?

Ever since the passage of Obamacare, columnist Charles Krauthammer has been warning that the only way to fund it will be value added tax (VAT). A value added tax is basically a hidden sales tax: you wouldn't know it was there except by the fact that the price of a product is higher. Unlike a sales tax, it is not taken as a percentage of the purchase price the customer pays, but is taken previously, through a tax on the different steps of production that put it into your hands.

According to Krauthammer, Obama's deficit reduction commission, which will render its findings (as one would expect) after the November elections, is headed inexorably toward recommending a VAT. It is, he argues, a necessary aspect of a socialist system like the one Obama is foisting on the country:

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare pre-empts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health care costs.

...It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million new recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.

Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody's is warning that the Treasury's AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.

Krauthammer observes that all European countries who have socialized health care have such a tax.

Is Krauthammer right? I guess we'll find out in November. After the debate is over.

Politicians say the darndest things: More on how much health care costs when it's free

It takes some nerve to claim that a massive new federal entitlement is going to save the taxpayers money, but anything goes in Washington when it comes to political rhetoric. Everyone is talking about how the CBO is claiming that the President's new health care plan is going to save $1.3 trillion. No joke.

But here is Fred Barnes explaining this whole process of claiming how thrifty you are going to be when you pass entitlement legislation and how taxpayers end up buried underneath the bills when the big federal program gets a good head of steam:

Take Medicare, enacted in 1965. The initial projection was it would cost $9 billion a year by 1990. The actual figure for 1990 turned out to be $67 billion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the baseline for Medicare in 2010 is $521.3 billion, which includes $55.3 billion for the prescription drug benefit approved in 2003.

Or take one part of Medicare, the End Stage Renal Disease program (ESRD) that entitles every sufferer, regardless of age, access to dialysis. It was created in 1972 and its spending for 1974 was projected at $100 million. The real cost was $229 million. In 2007, ESRD cost $23.9 billion, nearly 6 percent of Medicare’s overall spending that year.

Or take Medicaid’s program of “disproportionate share hospital” payments. Passed on 1987, it was projected to cost less than $1 billion in 1992. Its actual cost in 1992: $17 billion. The program’s cost would still be ballooning if it hadn’t been brought under control by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.

These faulty projections are not exceptions to the rule. They are the rule. The projection for the first year (1948) of the National Health Service in Britain was 260 pounds, far below the real cost of 359 pounds. The under-projections have continued to miss the actual demand for health services.

In Massachusetts, the universal coverage plan was predicted to cost $472 million in 2008, but the price tag turned out to be $628 million. Now Governor Deval Patrick wants to cap insurance rate increases to less than 5 percent annually, which would force insurance companies to cut payments to providers or quit the program. In 1994, Tennessee sought to control Medicaid spending with a new program called TennCare. By 2004, costs had more than tripled.

Read the rest here.

Former CBO head on the cost of the health care bill

There are those who really believe that we can have more available health care more cheaply without any diminution of quality. And the government is going to accomplish this. Yeah, right. And the evidence for this is that the Congressional Budget Office says so. Here is a former director of the CBO in the New York Times pointing out this magic is done:

Last Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that health care reform legislation would, over the next 10 years, cost about $950 billion, but because it would raise some revenues and lower some costs, it would also lower federal deficits by $138 billion. In other words, a bill that would set up two new entitlement spending programs — health insurance subsidies and long-term health care benefits — would actually improve the nation’s bottom line.

Could this really be true? How can the budget office give a green light to a bill that commits the federal government to spending nearly $1 trillion more over the next 10 years?

The answer, unfortunately, is that the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out.

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

~Former CBO Director Douglas Holz-Eakins (and currently president of the American Action Forum).

HT: Carpe Diem

Did the health care bill violate the Constitution?

Where I come from the same bill, in the same form, must be passed by both chambers before it goes to the chief executive for his signature, at which point it becomes law. In my 20 years in my own state legislature, I've never seen anything different. And yet the President is signing today the health care legislation in a form in which it has not been passed by the Senate.

This is quite literally preposterous.

Here is the Constitutional language on the matter:

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

The question is: if one chamber passes a piece of legislation in one form, and it is not approved in the same form by the other chamber, is it the same law? It only seems common sense that it is not, and to pass the law with only one chamber consenting is an abuse of the process. I can't imagine that this would pass a court challenge.

What hath Congress wrought?

The Wall Street Journal yesterday on the ramifications of the government's Health Care Heist:

This week's votes don't end our health-care debates. By making medical care a subsidiary of Washington, they guarantee such debates will never end. And by ramming the vote through Congress on a narrow partisan majority, and against so much popular opposition, Democrats have taken responsibility for what comes next—to insurance premiums, government spending, doctor shortages and the quality of care. They are now the rulers of American medicine.

Good point. A lot of people have been blathering on about how this was just like Medicare and Social Security, except, well, it's not. These pieces of legislation passed with bipartisan support, and therefore it was in the interest of both parties that they succeed--or be seen as succeeding. Not so Obamacare. It is no in the political interest of one of the two major parties that it be seen as a failure and no danger that it will be seen as responsible for it. This can't bode well for the legislation.

While the subsidies don't start until 2014, many of the new taxes and insurance mandates will take effect within six months. The first result will be turmoil in the insurance industry, as small insurers in particular find it impossible to make money under the new rules. A wave of consolidation is likely, and so are higher premiums as insurers absorb the cost of new benefits and the mandate to take all comers.

So there goes affordability. And there there is the matter of Bart Stupak:

We have never understood why pro-lifers consider abortion funding more morally significant than the rationing of care for cancer patients or at the end of life that will inevitably result from this bill. But in any case Democratic pro-lifers sold themselves for a song, as they usually do.

And most people think the health care industry didn't want this. If that is so, it is hard to figure out why they helped bring it about:

We also can't mark this day without noting that it couldn't have happened without the complicity of America's biggest health-care lobbies, including Big Pharma, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, the Business Roundtable and such individual companies as Wal-Mart. They hope to get more customers, or to reduce their own costs, but in the end they have merely made themselves more vulnerable to the gilded clutches of the political class.

The crocodile will eat them too--even if they get eaten last. So now it we'll have to see what happens at the polls:

While the passage of ObamaCare marks a liberal triumph, its impact will play out over many years. We fought this bill so vigorously because we have studied government health care in other countries, and the results include much higher taxes, slower economic growth and worse medical care. As for the politics, the first verdict arrives in November.

Read the rest here.

The coming Medicare catastrophe: Further evidence of what happens when health care is "free"

A health care problem in its own backyard the Obama administration could have addressed but didn't because it was too busy trying to take over the health care industry:

HT: Mercatus Center