besht2003

besht2003

98p

1,695 comments posted · 1 followers · following 0

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Who Lost the Shutdown ... · 0 replies · +2 points

I don't know how they disentangle this Pooh bear from the hole they stuck health care in...they put all these pieces together to keep the private insurers in the game and the market exchanges spill over to the private, if not via direct mandates via fungible costs that have to be picked up by someone somewheres.

Outside employer coverage, I I can't get medically underwritten insurance on the private market as a 62 year old with prior conditions. I just can't get it. They won't write a policy. Because, as you note, it wouldn't be "insurance" on an actuarial basis--they'd be in the business of providing health care. Personally, no, I don't want to die sick, broke, and in the street. Sorry Sean and Rush, emergency rooms are not free. They bill.

I had insurance when unemployed through federal programs COBRA and HIPA--and regulations already on the books *before Obamacare* mean that when employed my preconditions can't be singled out and put on a year waiting period for coverage (because I've maintained continuous coverage). Single employees pay significantly less than family plans, for years and years now. Conservatives have suggested that mandated maternity (and abortion?) care have raised premiums for any policy covering a woman insured--could be.

On COBRA and HIPA I paid on average $687 a month with deductible expense sharing about $5,000 in the COBRA. Under HIPA, no longer based on my original employer/employee pool, I paid about $687 a month with if memory serves about a $5,000 - $7,000 deductible and another $5,000 - $7,000 *expense sharing* exposure (though the expense sharing is doled out percentage wise incident by incident).

If I had no employer insurance, as a subsidized member of the exchanges, even without an additional tax subsidy, the rate drops to about $300 to $400 or so monthly with about $5,000 to $7,500 deductible. For a 62 year old with prior conditions, my rates vis a vis the former private market are good, Until the young and healthy's inability, failure, raised-middle-finger refusal to opt for policies they consider exorbitant ($200 a month for $5K deductible) rachets all the rates upwards.

I have no answers. I see from today's news that Sebelius and Pelosi are going well no, if the exchanges don't work in December that's not all that important.

But they are saying they are getting the "best and the brightest' to work on the exchanges to fix them. Well what did they have before, the worst and dumbest?

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Tea Party Despair and ... · 1 reply · +3 points

"As I say" another member of the Ta-taa Party. Little self-referential humor for a blog.

To repeat, your remark that the "entire population" has to sign on to a program is just one example of the malarky inscribed on your valentines to self. Nobody has to be angry to laugh at you. You are a natural target for mockery.

You realize that your whole self-inflated personna was the butt of countless Seinfeld jokes. Because you're an arsehole.

So in the manner of jbkurack I myself now have the perfect jbkburackian conclusive answer to anything jbkurack says, long or short, dashed off or composed after laborings deep into the night:

"Like I said, an arsehole"

You know the people who comment here don't like you but they'd meet you for lunch (not that you'd want to go). You won't get past Wehner or Tobin's servant entrance.

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - The Tea Party Mindset · 2 replies · +7 points

The Tea Party *is* a large base segment of the GOP electorate for determining the GOP's policies. Which is why I keep getting RNCC fund raising e-mails copping their themes. However politics doesn't stop between elections. Peter's post patronizes the GOP's own electorate (and seeks to derail its intervention in the primary process) but counsels no confrontations with the current President and Democratic Senate in order to win over the general electorate. Well that's a strategy but no guarantee that you'll get any better disposal than Romney got. whrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Tea Party Despair and ... · 6 replies · +7 points

blah blah blah "that the entire population can sign off on and legitimize." Sure. "The entire population" eh? And you think you are so so the smartest most sober person in the room. "The entire population" of the United States eh? That's enough is it? Maybe not. Which is why the Democratic Party wishes to add illegal aliens legalized under the next immigration reform bill Wehner and Tobin will support (just wait) to ACA. They'd like to sign up the entire population of the United States and the entire population of Mexico!! That's two populations!! Can't get any more legitimate than that.

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Tea Party Despair and ... · 0 replies · +10 points

so you've adopted HillelA's MO of adding meaningless snarky graffiti -- tagging snippy personal insults with a crooked rhetorical pinkie holding them up. "Ill give you that".

A mind that could hold, express, or accept the cockamamie notion the Founding Fathers would be horrified that one branch of government would impose "its views" on the other is not small, tiny or merely blown; it's out in space lodged head down in the planet in orbit beyond Saturn. That's why they designed a checks and balances system to begin with. They expected it. How they might feel about a President who then routinely fudged the Constitution or pretended to follow it by rewriting laws via executive fiat, well they expected that too. The question is what are you going to do about it? One answer, like it or not, is the Tea Party.

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Tea Party Despair and ... · 2 replies · +5 points

But Obama isn't interested in compromise. He's all about the zealotry and the kamikaze mission. Because he knows the establishment will always defensively stall their carrier in panicked dead-in-the-waters freeze; their craft blows up, his plane survives. So now Madison constitutional shuck and jive complements some chestnuts about Burke. And the very same establishment that councils prudence and patience on Obamacare (whose dead weight non-functioning exchanges may drag down the private health insurance system well in advance of November 2014) also blithely ignores the evidence of their senses and promotes the same kind of federal gargantuan "reform" in immigration. Obama traduces the Constitution today. The Tea Party did not set the republic on a course of stumbling from CR to CR, debt ceiling rise to debt ceiling rise. That Commentary now views House GOP parliamentary strategy as not just misjudged but a "horror" (the horror the horror) attempt to "impose its views" on the President is as naive as it is ignorant. It's hard to come up with two sentences that could pack so many absurd inanities between high-minded references to the Founding Fathers and the final period.

Mindblowing.

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Who Lost the Shutdown ... · 1 reply · +2 points

Ted Cruz has returned to defund. Indeed he still claims that defund, the maximalist strategy could have worked. A GOP operative made the same point you do about the actuarial unsoundness about a one year delay in the mandate because the young healthy don't sign up--but they aren't signing up *now*--you could shift forward the other timelines. I would have preferred the GOP take the lead in acting during the shut down to reopen the clearly dysfunctional ACA by a considered time-out, adjusting requirements vis a vis insurers as necessary and separating out if possible the leakage of the exchange failures into the private markets. Not to kill it or de facto defund it but to limit the damage.

This really is, on the implementation level (which is a symptom of the underlying law's weaknesses but also a failure in its own right) an epic fail. Usually the not uncommon failure of government data bases aren't mission critical and can be worked around. If Army procurement accounting cannot be audited because cost accounting systems are out of whack, *procurement still continues*.

But here the functioning of the data systems, the web portal and data warehousing hubs, *was itself mission critical*--if they failed the whole thing doesn't work.

imo Cruz is willing to suffer high-risk tactical set-backs to achieve his ultimate goals (say defunding Obama care) because he believes there will be other hands with other cards dealt to play. Still, the system may bounce unpredictably under repeated stress applied to the fracture points of Obama CR by CR and debt ceiling by debt ceiling government. And I think Cruz is disingenuous or mistaken in claiming that the Senate leadership fold prevented the defunding from working.

But the exchanges could well continue to cascade and an actuarial death-spiral take hold as young can't sign up or opt out. If Obama refuses to reconsider (enabled by MSM blackout post shudtown) then the defund/repeal option will become increasingly attractive. And the "establishment" tut-tutting just-take-a-deep-breath-relax-and-think-of-2014 response, overtaken by events, will move from complacent, head-in-the-sand to deluded.

John McCain's career before his Vietnam trial may also bear on appreciating his reaction to upstart Cruz. He himself was ant-authority, an "upstart", protected however by the status of his father, John S. McCain Jr., Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC), commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater from 1968 to 1972. McCain's record at Annapolis reads like Poe's at West Point. His dare devil flying cost the Navy one plane and cut power lines in Spain.

So "old bull" McCain may see his younger self in Ted Cruz's pushing the envelope. The reaction is not necessarily a he's-a-chip-off-my-block empathy but identity/turf alarm bells.

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Who Lost the Shutdown ... · 1 reply · +2 points

The Tea Party opposed by Commentary, do not draw the conclusions you started out with. They don't see the connection between Commentary or Jeb Bush or Peter King or McCain and their support of Israel. So I don't see why anyone's response should be well they refuse to build coalitions with the Tea Party--I will rethink my support of their "pet policies" if the Tea Party itself doesn't make that connection. They wear pants too and use forks when they eat. Some things aren't quid pro quo.

Personally, as a production techie I think it's shameful that the exchanges don't work. I don't think that the ACA is the worst abuse of the Obama administration but is a symptom in its overreaching and failure to date of the Obama administration abuses. I don't think it could have been defunded. I do think that in one or two weeks the individual mandate could have been delayed which would have been a good thing for everyone if they had passed a clean debt limit bill and left the partial shut down in effect.

Go visit Israel. It's an easy country to tour as the distances aren't great and you can cover half the north south length in a day or less. See what it's like. It's a real country and exists quite apart from whether Commentary does support it or not or whether Commentary doers support the Tea Party or condemns it. Israel has great beaches, lots of historical places to visit, Jerusalem is beautiful. But taking a tour of the country can bring home it's actuality--it's more than the sum of the arguments about its politics and the Palestinians.

Negotiations with Iran for Obama are top menu items, win, loose or draw on domestic issues. I think he would negotiate no matter what--also the more he loses at home the more attractive some kind of Iranian "achievement". If the Iranian's don't push the West's nose in the dirt by demanding immediate lifting of all sanctions they'll get a deal. Who knows maybe even then. Even if Congress doesn't go along Obama could get out his "waiver" pen. The deal is in the works. That train has left the station.

Here's the problem with an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel. Even if they put together 5-20 weapons, Israel has a submarine nuclear capacity in addition to their air-launched capacity. Iran will cesae to exist as a functioning modern state. Tens of millions of Iranians will be killed and though the Jewish state may be de facto liquidated the Iranian religious theocracy will, to put it mildly, be discredited.

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - The Tea Party Mindset · 4 replies · +11 points

The Tea Party is not talking about imminent apocalypse. Mark Levin, to use one example, has proposed a plan for a convention to amend the Constitution called by the states that is a very long term commitment--"years if not decades". Peter Wehner's response, self-serving on the cuff psychologizing and even more self-serving complacency is flabbergasting:

"This is, rather, a [sorta] difficult time..that requires sobriety and wisdom, public officials of courage and good judgment who are willing to act boldly but not recklessly..."

Funny, the bottom-up participation of Republican *voters* is backgrounded in this Confucian nutshell Nirvana of high-minded high-tone nomenklatura. Presumably they are mobilized with other required demographic interests every two years by sober campaign consultants of courage and good judgement who are willing to act boldly but not inexpensively. Unaddressed is how all this bold but not too bold sobriety can break through the corrupted, increasingly dominant, dysfunctional and cynically ruthless Democratic Party machine that currently has the GOP bottlenecked in 1/2 of 1/3 etc.

But he sure knows that GOP challenges to gerrymandered incumbents get in the way.

He turns Tea Party and conservative objections to the Democrat's Borg hegemony into a cartoon of loony-toonz Tea Partiers who want to burn his BFFs at the stake.

Peter, there's a difference between primaries and Burning Man. Really. The only men being burned here are the straw men of your own argument.

--scene from Peter Wehner's upcoming documentary: "The Ugly Truth behind Tea Party Primary Challenges: Exposed!!! "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Szoz8LxDA

10 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - Who Lost the Shutdown ... · 2 replies · +2 points

Also this on how terribly awry Obamacare has gone:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/361577/asses...

Delay was always a better bet than defund because it overlapped a key interest of the Democrats themselves: not to have Obamacare just lie face up on the beach stranded on actuarial high tide rotting in pieces as only the most committed (and at risk) insurance net "takers" would persist in signing up. The administration may well be forced on its own to delay or even pull parts or the entirety of the mandate.

The GOP split played out between the "let it collapse on its own and we have a selling point for 2014" faction and the "we must kill it now" faction. But to strangle it you had to get to a very well protected crib. For delay you needed to get the other side to agree that maybe they don't want their baby choking to death on bug infested baby food. Delay was considered late and abandoned early.

----

The writer adds: "Obamacare was also always going to be a test of the sheer capacity of the administrative state to actually do what it claims the authority and ability to do. At this point, it looks as though we may be witnessing a failure of the administrative state on a level unimagined even by its staunchest critics. We may be. But we’ll have to see."

The administrative state was able to go to the moon and successfully fight WWII. The post office and the DMV both work two zillion percent more efficiently than this fiasco. But we are now seeing for sure a test case for the current Democratic regime's ability to implement--not long term, at all--their big big promises.

This is "immigration reform" on Obama. Does the GOP really need to go for those broken eggs?