Tag: health care

What About That Quaint Idea of “Separation of Powers”?

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So the Democrats ram through – without a single Republican vote – the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” and Obama signs it into law on March 23, 2010.  Before passage, Nancy Pelosi laid this one on us:  “We have to pass it so you can find out what’s in it!”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU?rel=0]
Well, now we know what’s in it:


About 11.5 million words of regulations from the 906 (PDF) page law (2700 pages as published for the consumption of Congress) that, again, apparently nobody read prior to voting for. (Thanks, Nancy!)

And, in direct contrast to Obama’s promise that the legislative negotiations behind this law would be aired on CSPAN…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVkzm0YPAc?rel=0]
…the actual negotiations took place away from cameras, and with major influence from the lobbyists that Obama told us would not stain his presidency.  Even the Daily Kos objected. 

And then he told us that the “penalty” for non-compliance with the ACA requirements was NOT. A. TAX.

Then it survived a Supreme Court decision which said it was only constitutional if the “penalty” WAS. A. TAX.

And in July of this year when problems with implementation began to become apparent, Obama unilaterally gave businesses a one-year extension on their legal mandate to conform with the law.

Wait a minute. This is a LAW. Part II, Section 1511 specifies what “Employer Responsibilities” are, effective “calendar years beginning after 2013.”

Congress has not voted on this change.

And today, after his repeated promise that “If you like you plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” turned out to be as false as his CSPAN transparency promise and his “not a tax” declaration, he’s done it again with respect to the individual mandate.

Even Howard Dean wonders where he gets this amazing power:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPI7rABWI9c?rel=0]
It’s not like this is anything really new, though. The Justice Department certainly isn’t going to go prosecuting anyone that Obama doesn’t want prosecuted.

But this isn’t rule of law. This is Obama granting “special dispensation” – a power not given to the Office of President under the Constitution. The Legislative branch passes the laws, the Executive signs or vetoes them, and the Judicial branch tries and punishes violators of those laws.

But we’ve reached a point where the President can just say “never mind,” and nobody calls him on it.

What do you call that form of government again?  Because it’s certainly not a Constitutional Republic.

“…there will be different people who benefit and different people who don’t.”

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Do tell.

A reader sent me an email early this morning with a link to this Pro Publica story – Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled by Obamacare. It’s hard to resist schadenfreude when you read stuff like:

San Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are “cradle Democrats.” They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election.

Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietitian and diabetes educator. “We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,” Hammack told me.

The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized. But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse.

Awwwww. Sucks when karma runs over your dogma, doesn’t it?

Hammack recalled his reaction when he and his wife received a letters from Kaiser in September informing him their coverage was being canceled. “I work downstairs and my wife had a clear look of shock on her face,” he said. “Our first reaction was clearly there’s got to be some mistake. This was before the exchanges opened up. We quickly calmed down. We were confident that this would all be straightened out. But it wasn’t.”

Do tell. I guess he was in favor of Obamacare before he found out that he, personally, would be paying for it.

But wait! It gets better!

In a speech in Boston last week, President Obama said those receiving cancellation letters didn’t have good insurance. “There are a number of Americans — fewer than 5 percent of Americans — who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident,” he said.

“Remember, before the Affordable Care Act, these bad-apple insurers had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received, or use minor preexisting conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy. So a lot of people thought they were buying coverage, and it turned out not to be so good.”

What is going on here? Kaiser isn’t a “bad apple” insurer and this plan wasn’t “cut rate.” It seems like this is a lose-lose for the Hammacks….

What’s going on here? Obama LIED. Again. And it is a “lose-lose” situation.

But here’s the pullquote for me:

“In a few cases, we are able to find coverage for them that is less expensive, but in most cases, we’re not because, in sort of pure economic terms, they are people who benefited from the current system … Now that the market rules are changing, there will be different people who benefit and different people who don’t.”

“There’s an aspect of market disruption here that I think was not clear to people,” (Kaiser Permanente spokesman Chris) Stenrud acknowledged. “In many respects it has been theory rather than practice for the first three years of the law; folks are seeing the breadth of change that we’re talking about here.”

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. For the Left, it isn’t results that matter, it’s intention. Read on:

So what is Hammack going to do? If his income were to fall below four times the federal poverty level, or about $62,000 for a family of two, he would qualify for subsidies that could lower his premium cost to as low as zero. If he makes even one dollar more, he gets nothing.

That’s what he’s leaning toward — lowering his salary or shifting more money toward a retirement account and applying for a subsidy.

Wait – a LIBERAL is threatening to “Go Galt”? And I have to object here. Earlier in the piece the author states that Hammack and Brothers make not much more than four times the federal poverty level, or “about $62,000 for a family of two.” In San Francisco. And he’s an architect. One: How does a couple live on $62k in San Francisco, and Two: If he’s an architect, what does he design, playground equipment?

“We’re not changing our views because of this situation, but it hurt to hear Obama saying, just the other day, that if our plan has been dropped it’s because it wasn’t any good, and our costs would go up only slightly,” he said. “We’re gratified that the press is on the case, but frustrated that the stewards of the ACA don’t seem to have heard.”

Or care.  And you’re lefties from San Francisco.  I wouldn’t expect you to change your views if Obama himself put the muzzle of a re-educator to your skull and pulled the trigger.  Or as one commenter put it:

…they would follow Obama off a cliff, then thank him when at the bottom, he finished them off with a bayonet.

There you go talking about “death panels” again.  Perhaps they should donate $500,000 to Organizing for America. Maybe then they can get a waiver, too.

Oh, and by all means, read the comments to the piece.

A View from the Inside

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I received an email yesterday afternoon from a reader who did not want to leave it as a comment because his name and email might be attached to it by Disqus.  Here it is:

I’m long-time reader and sometime commenter. I wanted to comment on your post on “Government is Magic”, but for reasons which will become obvious I didn’t want my name or e-mail associated with my comment publicly. If you believe any of this is worth sharing feel free to do so, without my name or e-mail address associated of course.

I work for the company responsible for the Obamacare web site fiasco. I don’t work for the Federal division, but a different one. I can tell you from personal experience that the problems that caused the web site to fail are institutional.

If you or I were going to embark on a project we’d try to get the most competent people in each area of expertise required in an effort to make the project a success. That’s not the way this company does things. First, especially if the project is highly visible, they make sure that the people assigned to the project are the “right” people. Not “right” as you or I would understand it, namely competent, with a strong work ethic, and capable of delivering. Oh no, the “right” people are politically connected, they belong to the “correct” groups of people, or they’re people who others wish to see advance (often despite their incompetence). So it’s more important that the project leader be a Hispanic woman than that the project leader have any actual experience with the technology, or even be capable of doing the job. Just as it was more important to give the project to a company whose VP was a black woman than that it have a proven track record of getting similar projects done successfully. All the better if that VP went to Princeton with a certain FLOTUS. Even better if money went to a certain re-election campaign.

A dozen competent developers could have delivered a functional web site, their compensation would have cost one or two percent of what the contract brought in. Doing so, however, would have required an acknowledgement that such people were required for the success of the project, or that a functional web site had anything to do with such success.

I used to think the problems I saw were localized to my little corner of the company, but it seems the problems are with the company mentality. Worse, as far as the company is concerned this was a big win. They made a TON of money, and they’re managing (so far as the media is concerned) to foist the blame off onto others. They’ll now make a ton MORE money fixing a system that should never have been broken in the first place.

I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, I’ve worked for a bunch of companies, and this is the first time I’ve ever been ashamed to have my name connected to the company that writes my paycheck.

Shame? I thought the Left had effectively destroyed that concept.

What Happens When the Media Narrative™ on Gun Control Loses Traction?

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They go back to scaaaaary numbers!  And they beat their drums made from the skins of dead children.

Terrible tally: 500 children dead from gunshots every year, 7,500 hurt, analysis finds

That’s the headline. Here’s the first line of the piece (emphasis mine):

About 500 American children and teenagers die in hospitals every year after sustaining gunshot wounds — a rate that climbed by nearly 60 percent in a decade, according to the first-ever accounting of such fatalities, released Sunday.

Children and teens – which includes 18 and 19 year-old “children” who are legally adults.

But wait! It gets better!

In addition, an estimated 7,500 kids are hospitalized annually after being wounded by gunfire, a figure that spiked by more than 80 percent from 1997 to 2009, according two Boston doctors presenting their findings at a conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics, held in Orlando, Fla.

Eight of every 10 firearm wounds were inflicted by handguns, according to hospital records reviewed by the doctors. They say the national conversation about guns should shift toward the danger posed by smaller weapons, not the recent fights over limiting the availability of military-style, semi-automatic rifles.

So the urgent need to reinstate the assault weapon ban is not so urgent after all?

Just as an aside, I did a Google search on the name of one of the authors, Dr. Arin L. Madenci. Google returned 9,380 hits. The first eight pages are almost exclusively this announcement. Of the dozen or so stories I scanned, not one had a link to the actual report, just the database that spawned it.

So let’s look at some numbers.

The NBC piece states:

Madenci, and his colleague, Dr. Christopher Weldon, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, tallied the new statistics by culling a national database of 36 million pediatric hospitalizations from 1997 to 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available.
During that period, hospitalizations of kids and teens aged 20 and younger from gunshot wounds jumped from 4,270 to 7,730. Firearm deaths of children logged by hospitals rose from 317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009, records showed.

Wait – “aged 20 and younger? I thought we were talking “children and teens”?

The Centers for Disease Control has a tool, WISQARS, which stands for Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System. It has subsections on fatal injury, non-fatal injury, and violent injury statistics, though the last covers only sixteen states and is “not nationally representative.” That’s OK though. The fatal and non-fatal statistics can be searched by “violence-related” or “unintentional.” The CDC numbers go through 2010.

In 1997, according to the CDC, for “children” aged 0-19 there were 4,223 gunshot fatalities, not 317. Apparently the overwhelming majority of these gunshot fatalities never made it to a hospital. The non-fatal data only goes back to 2000, so I can’t do a comparison, but you’d think they’d want to use the higher number. But here’s the interesting part where this “news” piece becomes an opinion piece without bothering to inform you of the fact:  of the total of 1,005 words in the NBC piece, the first 298 of them are about the study and its results. The remaining 707 are about how you should feel about it. They relate to the tragic death of 3-year-old Will McAnaul who died from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound. As I have said before, this is the kind of thing that really irritates me. As I said then:
 Now, what are you to infer from this? You are to infer that the majority of these injuries and deaths are accidental, are you not?

Let’s look at the CDC’s numbers in more depth.

For 1997, children 0-12 years of age, gunshot fatalities: 318
Unintentional: 84
Violence-related (includes suicide): 226
Known suicide: 20

Eighty-four accidental deaths. Over two hundred homicides.

For 1997, children 13-19, gunshot fatalities: 3,905 (12.63/100,000 population)
Unintentional: 222
Violence related: 3,616
Suicide: 1,242

That means 2,374 were homicides.

Let’s jump to 2009.

Children 0-12, gunshot fatalities: 209
Unintentional: 44
Violence-related: 156
Suicide: 14

Age 13-19 total gunshot fatalities: 2,502 (8.25/100,000 population)
Unintentional: 90
Violence-related: 2,383
Suicide: 735

Excuse me?

The story plainly states that:

…hospitalizations of kids and teens aged 20 and younger from gunshot wounds jumped from 4,270 to 7,730. Firearm deaths of children logged by hospitals rose from 317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009, records showed.

But the Centers for Disease Control data also plainly states that the total “firearm deaths” of children aged from birth to nineteen years of age went from 4,223 to 2,811 – a decrease of 1,412 in raw numbers and a death rate decrease of almost 63%.  Accidental death by gunshot dropped by 60%.

And all of this in the face of expanding “shall-issue” concealed-carry legislation, and at least four million new guns being purchased each year – at least half of them handguns.

The CDC numbers are far higher than those used by Doctors Arin L. Madenci and Christopher Weldon, and they are nothing to be proud of, but they trend DOWN, and dramatically. You can’t frighten people with declining statistics. Instead, they had to find numbers they could cherry-pick to support The Narrative™ that guns are a disease vector, and that more guns = more “gun deaths.”

And every news service in the country, and many more worldwide picked up the “story” (and I use that word with dripping sarcasm) and ran with it.

LAYERS of editorial fact-checking!!

Agenda?  What agenda?

Remember, they’re The Other Side.  It’s what they do.  It’s all they do.  And they absolutely will not stop.

So we can’t either.

UPDATE: NBC reporter Bill Briggs, who wrote the linked article, is on Facebook. I asked him about his story. Specifically, I asked:  “Mr. Briggs, I read your piece. Don’t you guys have fact checkers?”  His response:

The study conducted by these surgical residents came from the first-ever data mining of firearms injuries/deaths from this statistical set (KID). It warrants coverage. We noted in the article that this pediatric database typically includes anyone 20 and under (although for one year of data, the cut off was younger). We typically try to put faces and personal stories with any numbers reported in all our stories, no matter the topic.

I asked him:

Doesn’t it bother you – even a little – that they reported a significant increase in fatalities (317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009) while the Centers for Disease Control reported a significant DECREASE in fatalities (and a MUCH higher total count)? Does that not tell you that the KID statistical set is pretty much USELESS for the purpose they put it to (if you don’t assume that their purpose was to push gun control)? Doesn’t THAT “warrant coverage”? Doesn’t it make you ask “Why”?

We’ll see if he replies.

UPDATE II:  He did.  Here’s the remainder of the exchange:

Yes, we cover all those trend lines.

Also, if you read the abstract written by these two surgeons, you’ll note that they are not pushing a social agenda. They speak to the statistics from a clinical perspective. They only venture slightly down that road when citing the higher percentage of handgun injuries in contrast to ongoing debates about so-called assault rifles.

Bill, where was the link to the abstract in your piece? I saw links only to the KID website and to Patcine McAnaul’s blog. (And though you chose Will McAnaul as the face for your story, I think even you would admit that stating his case “may” have been one included in the data is stretching it. He was “declared dead” at the hospital, not admitted.)

I saw no mention of “trend lines” other than “hospitalizations of kids and teens aged 20 and younger from gunshot wounds jumped from 4,270 to 7,730. Firearm deaths of children logged by hospitals rose from 317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009, records showed.”

With respect to the doctors, you don’t find this comment suggestive? “Policies designed to reduce the number of household firearms, especially handguns, may more effectively reduce the number of gunshot injuries in children,” Madenci said.

This INSISTS that “the number of gunshot injuries in children” is INCREASING – an assertion BELIED by the CDC data that says it’s DECREASING – dramatically – WITHOUT such “policies” despite the increasing number of firearms in private hands – especially handguns.

In short, your piece provides false information in support of a false narrative, but it “warrants coverage” while the truth – as uncomfortable as it is – does not.

And you wonder why people no longer trust the media?

Thank you for your thoughts. The American Academy of Pediatrics can offer additional information on this research.

Thank you for your responses.

As my daughter said to me tonight on the telephone, “I kept waiting for him to respond, and he never did.”

Another Interesting Data Point

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Even though my office is close to home, I tend to eat lunch at the various restaurants around the area.  When I’m eating lunch by myself, I always have something to read – usually whatever nonfiction book I’m working on at the time.  At one restaurant I almost always get the same waitress, a pleasant woman a few years older than I am, who takes an interest in whatever I happen to be reading.  We’ve had some interesting, if abbreviated, discussions.

I hadn’t been there for awhile, and they have a pretty good patty melt, so that’s where I went today.  After taking my order and then serving me, she said – out of the blue – “At your job, were you able to keep your health insurance?”  When I said yes, she asked how big the company I worked for was.  It’s about 100 people.

Turns out, her husband works for a much smaller company.  She and her husband had just received a letter informing them that they were losing their company-assisted health insurance and would be moving to the Obamacare pool.  The “Silver” plan that would be automatically replacing their previous insurance would cost them an extra $400 a month.

And has an $8,000 deductible.

They could, of course, decline this automatic option and go shopping for themselves.

If, of course, the web site every actually – you know – works.

“So much for being able to keep the plan we were happy with!” she said.  

UPDATE:  Here’s another.