Category Archives: Pants on Fire

Delay Is Not Working

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Republicans, June 1: “Please Mr. President, just cancel Obamacare.”
Obama: “No.”

Dealmaker John BoehnerRepublicans, July 1: “Please Mr. President, just change Obamacare.”
Obama: “No.”

Republicans, August 1: “Please Mr. President, just end the mandate.”
Obama: “No.”

Republicans, September 1: “Please Mr. President, we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow Obamacare down.”
Obama: “No.”

Republicans, October 1: “Please Mr. President, just defund Obamacare.”
Dealmaker Barack ObamaObama: “No.”

Republicans, November 1: “Please Mr. President, just cancel the mandate for a year.”
Obama: “No.”

Republicans, December 1: “Pretty please Mr. President, just delay the mandate for a few days.”
Obama: “No.”

Republicans, today, Monday, December 23: “We’re sorry, Americans. We tried our best.”
Obama: “Let me clarify that you will automatically qualify for a ‘hardship exemption’ from the mandate if your health plan was canceled.”

For the record, today, Monday, December 23 was the deadline to bind health coverage that will start January 1.

Also for the record, I’m not dumb enough to go without health insurance. I’m a 64-year-old American in good health with a cancelled Blue Cross policy that I liked. I’m not dumb enough to go without health insurance because my friend the former South Puffin mayor tripped on the sidewalk the other day. He broke his neck. He’s paralyzed. He was in pretty good health, too.

It took me only 28 otherwise billable hours including three looooooooooong phone calls to sign up. I (probably) now have a policy I don’t like, from a government I don’t trust, confirmed by a website that doesn’t work.

 

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming…

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Two more not so affordable parts of the Unaffordable Health Care Act:

1. You don’t qualify for a subsidy if your income is less than 100% of the Federal Poverty Level.

2. Likewise you don’t get a subsidy if your filing status is “married filing separately.” If you’re married, your tax filing status must be “married filing jointly” in order to qualify for a subsidy.

“So, the poor folk this is designed to cover can’t afford it?”

$11,490. That’s the 2013 Federal Poverty Guideline for one individual living anywhere in the 48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia.
$11,491. That’s the minimum one individual living anywhere in the 48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia can earn to qualify for an Obamacare subsidy
25,273,000. That’s the number of individuals living anywhere in the 48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia who earn less than $11,490.
25,273,000. That’s the number of individuals living anywhere in the 48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia who don’t qualify for Obamacare premium tax credits or cost-sharing subsidies.

That’s right, Pookie, if you are the poorest of the poor, you don’t get premium tax credits or cost-sharing subsidies. [Note to those who are counting, some but not all of those 25,273,000 do qualify for Medicaid.]

“And if you and your spouse don’t live together, you’re basically screwed.”

About 2,408,000 people filed separate returns in 2009, the most recent year the IRS has published. About 1,811,779 (One million, eight hundred eleven thousand, seven hundred seventy-nine) of those reported less that $49,960 in income, the cut-off for individual subsidies. One point eight million people left out by the Unaffordable Care Act.

Well, Pookie, you might not be getting screwed but, yeah, you are.

If you support Obamacare, this is what your crutch hath wrought.


Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy
 

Worser

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“The way this thing is going, it is a good thing we have a word like worser,” Bob Schieffer said yesterday morning on Face the Nation.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Lies.

“If the website doesn’t work, nothing else matters,” Barack Obama, 2010.

The Washington Post reports that in 2010 a pointed memo warned Mr. Obama’s top economic aides that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of constructing the insurance exchange and all the other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page Unaffordable Care Act into practice. The Washington Post. Not the Washington Times. Not the WashingtonExaminer.com. The Washington Post.

Didn’t matter.

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said Harvard’s David Cutler, a health adviser to Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Damned lies.

“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Barack Obama, 23 times from 2008 through 2010, and again in 2011. And again in 2012.

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) may have rolled out the official Doublespeak: “As I understand it, you can keep it up to the time the bill was enacted, then after that it’s a different story. I think that part of it, if true, was never made clear.” Your liberal friends will be quoting this now.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Statistics.

It’s not even the biggest startup. Amazon.com attracts about 65 million customers every month. Healthcare.gov must handle the 15 million people who buy their health insurance on the individual market. About 2.7 million of them tried in the first few days, or about half what Amazon handles each and every day during the Christmas season.

I use amazon.com and find it easy and intuitive. And the widgets I buy arrive in a truck 5 to 8 days later. I’ve tried to use healthcare.gov several times. It ain’t easy or intuitive and I still don’t have any idea of what policy I’ll have 58 days from now when my current policy evaporates.

And the hits just keep on coming.

I'm from the Government

Whether the website works isn’t the problem. The website is symptomatic of the problem.

“They didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. My liberal friends devoutly believe that you don’t actually need to know anything to run a business. Or, apparently, to run a government.

“It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills,” Dr. Cutler said.

That’s our choice. Do we trust a government that trains for disaster, then rolls out FEMA; that has the greatest web gurus in the world, then gets caught spying on Angela Merkel; that has 3-1/2 years to build a Blue Cross website, then rolls out Ms. Feinstein’s sorry excuses? Do we trust that government to stitch our wounds and mend our broken bones?

My liberal friends are devout. And wrong.

And the hits just keep on coming.

 

Keeping Our Promises

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“Dear Valued Customer:

“Your health care coverage with Blue Cross/Blue Shield ends December 31, 2013. Please make other arrangements.”

The new Blue Cross BlueOptions Everyday Health 1431 plan has about twice the deductible, out of pocket max, and copays as the plan I have now. My current Blue Cross plan costs $431/month. ACA forced Blue Cross to drop that plan in favor of one that will cost at least $1,039.87/month.

Yep. Keeping our promises to the American people.

Or not.

Update: Brian Williams had this to say about that on NBC Nightly News.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mo’ Brains

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Certain mice and voles have grown bigger brains over the last 100 years.

Mouse line art from Wikimedia CommonsIn her new study, Anthropogenic Environments Exert Variable Selection on Cranial Capacity in Mammals, University of Minnesota biologist Emilie C. Snell-Rood offers a startling affirmation that where critters live may well cause the evolution of bigger brains. And smaller ones.

Dr. Snell-Rood looked at a collection of mammal skulls collected as early as the beginning of the 20th Century by the University of Minnesota. She measured the dimensions of the skulls of ten species including mice, shrews, bats and gophers.

Mouse with bigger craniumThe brains of the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole who had lived several generations in cities were some six percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or wood. She concluded that their brains grew when these species moved to the bright lights and big city distractions.

Uh oh. Does that mean I would have gotten that Nobel by now had I just not stayed a country mouse?

Maybe it’s not just city life.

Evolutionary biologists recognize change is a formidable evolutionary force. Corn’s wild ancestor is teosinte, a grass with tassels. While grasses don’t look much like corn-on-the-cob, a single gene changed by a single kernel’s (almost) uninterrupted passage through a wolf brought about a longer cob in the next season. Likewise, bacteria have adapted to antibiotics in less than a century.

Dr. Snell-Rood found two species of shrews and two species of bats grew mo’ brains in rural Minnesota as well.

She proposes that the brains of all six species have gotten bigger because the radically disrupted environment allows only the animals better at learning to survive.

[Ed. Note: Neanderthal cranial capacity is now believed to have been larger than human skulls. Reconstructions of Neanderthal infants showed that Neanderthals and modern humans started with the same size skull but the Neanderthal brain outpaced the modern human brain by adulthood.]

The Minnesota study also found that the cranial capacity shrinks in species in environments that require no added learning to survive.

Mouse with smaller craniumA subsequent study at the Lightman Group looked at rattus norvegicus trained to hide food from their study group. The animal models developed an interesting added behavior: after the initial concealment, the animals studied distracted all the others in the environment away from the hiding place. In other words, they lied to their study group. After just three generations, cranial capacity in the entire cohort shrank by eight percent.

Finally, a Smithsonian Institution study of groups of 535 people in Washington DC from 1900-2012 shows that brains have gotten 11 percent smaller in that sample.