Category Archives: Health care

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Administration officials and defenders often claim that demand and volume overloaded the Federal exchange when it was rolled out. This claim is, in fact, not true, and I’d like to see what that lie tells us about organizational behavior inside the administration, and how it will react to future ObamaCare problems — which will be numerous.

First, some examples of the false claim, both from the administration and its defenders:

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Obama’s “remarks” are a sales pitch. WaPo’s MoDo, Dana Milbank: “Not since the Ginsu knife cut through an aluminum can and still sliced a tomato has America seen a pitch quite like the one President Obama delivered.” Much more importantly, Jon Stewart: “When did the President of the United States turn into Gill from the Simpsons?” The Wordle tells the story; let’s break out the color coding magic markers:

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Lambert here: Most coverage of ObamaCare (ACA) policies available through the Exchanges, especially Democratic-friendly coverage, has focused on the price of polices, rather than their value. This post by Dromaius focuses on value, and shows why the distinction between “in-network” and “out-of-network” coverage is important. At least in the case tested here, insurance companies are shown to “narrow” their networks, and hence coverage available to their policyholders, to exclude specialties like oncology, cardiology, internal medicine, and neurology.

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

For Obama watchers, it seem ludicrous to imagine that he has any concern for rights whatever, in particular for the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Be that as it may, Obama has clearly stated that health care is a right, so I’m going to take him at his word. Here he is in debate during Campaign 2008:

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone, and Lambert Strether, who blogs at Corrente. Joe did the heavy lifting on this!

Many people, and especially Obama supporters, characterize the ACA (ObamaCare) as “just starting” or a “work in progress” and then go on to urge that the program will have “glitches,” needs to be “tweaked,” isn’t yet “fully implemented,” and so forth. We think it’s a mistake to see the ACA as just starting. We also think it’s a mistake not to weigh the costs of ObamaCare’s stately three-year progress toward partial coverage for the the American people, and just as important to weigh the opportunity costs.

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Perhaps this will be a useful metaphor to explain how ObamaCare really works:

Imagine you walk into a hospital seeking health care: Perhaps for something major, like heart failure, or something minor, like a broken arm. You sign in at the front desk and explain your situation to the nurse on duty. In response, they reach under the desk and pull out an extraordinary contraption: A combination, it seems, of a miniature steam engine, the Wheel of Fortune, a cuckoo-clock, and a football scoreboard. There’s a crank on the side of it, which the nurse, having rolled up their sleeves, turns vigorously with one arm, while feeding lumps of coal into the steam engine’s firebox with the other. Clutching your chest (or your arm) you notice two doors behind the desk. They have signs which read: Special Limited Facilities, and Service Grand Royale. The cranking stops: The steam engine emits three shrill whistles: The Wheel of Fortune judders to a halt at $500: you hear “Cuckoo, cuckoo”: and see (in lights) 42. The nurse notes these results, consults a large three-ring binder, and points you to the door marked Special Limited Facilities. Or perhaps it’s your lucky day, and Service Grand Royale is yours, all yours!

By lambert strether of Corrente.

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In this continuing series, we’ve been looking at how ObamaCare, through its inherent system architecture, relentlessly creates first- and second-class citizens; how it treats citizens, who should be treated equally, unequally, for whimsical or otherwise bogus reasons. It’s all in the luck of the draw! If you live in the right place or have the right demographic, you go first class to Happyville. If you don’t, you go in coach to Pain City.