Category Archives: Health care

Obamacare Enrollments Show Low Uptake by Uninsured, Hoisting Insurers on Their Own Petard

One of the few saving graces is that the health insurers’ scheme to enrich themselves known as Obamacare may be going pear-shaped from the standpoint of their profits.

Why is the CDC Trying to Block an Accurate Lyme Disease Test?

Yves here. While this article may seem a bit far afield for this website, it illustrates how political considerations influence science and medicine, two fields we have been indoctrinated to view as relatively free of corporate and ideological influences.

Bob Goodwin: Mainstream Medicine Capture of Wikipedia

Yves here. Wikipedia has become widely accepted as a highly credible source (I use it and even contributed in their recent funding appeal). It’s therefore important to know its limits and how they arise. Unfortunately, it appears, like most information sources, that it is subject to pressure, in this case, as Bob Goodwin contends, the medical-industrial complex.

Simon Johnson Reminds Us That the Banks’ Quiet Coup is Still Very Much in Place

Simon Johnson wrote a remarkably blunt article for the Atlantic in May 2009 titled The Quiet Coup. In case you managed to miss it, it remains critically important reading. He provided an update of sorts in a New York Times column today.

America’s Shopper-in-Chief Has His Staff Sign Him Up for ObamaCare (But Not His Family)

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

And in a genius PR move, the White House describes Obama’s act of successful shopping avoidance as “symbolic.” As indeed it is, although not in the way the White House thinks, or could be said to think. WaPo has the details:

Obamacare Implementation as Teachable Moment

By Dan Fejes, who lives in northeast Ohio. Cross posted from Pruning Shears

Here is an interesting thing about the new health care law: News stories on it sometimes conflate flaws in the existing system with those in the new one. Many complaints about Obamacare are actually complaints about America’s health care system.

The administration bears some blame for that; the White House has done some conflating of its own. Most famously, the president assured us we would be able to keep our plans. That was never a promise he was in a position to keep. The new program still goes through the private insurance market, which means they decide what customers are restricted to.

Obama Exempts “If You Like It You Can Keep It” Cancelees from the Individual Mandate

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

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

In a six-part series on “ObamaCare’s relentless creation of second-class citizens,” I showed how people seeking health care through ObamaCare’s exchanges get randomly varying access to care because of age, geography (state and county), income, employment status, banking status, internet access, existing insurance status, language, demographics, and by CMS marketing category (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. In addition, people “on the bubble” for income eligibility are incentivized to corrupt the system by gaming it.)

As Many Uninsured Oppose Obamacare as Favor It

The uninsured, which along with those with existing conditions, would seem to be the clearest beneficiaries of Obamacare, and were thus assumed by many to favor it. But a new poll shows that on the whole far more distrustful that the Administration likely expected.

Michael Hudson: Trade Advantage Replaced by Rent Extraction

An interview with Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, on the Renegade Economists radio/podcast

401(k) Plan Abuses Finally Coming to Light

I doubt that I’m unusual in being a finance type who has heard about 401 (k) abuses and bad practices for a very long time. So it’s gratifying to see the Financial Times that something is finally being done to try to curb this behavior. But that is hardly the full extent of what is rotten in retirement fund land.

Why Obamacare Cannot “Insure” for Pre-Existing Conditions

Why “insurance” for existing conditions is a bit of a misnomer, and why that matters in terms of health care policy.

ObamaCare and Its Opportunity Costs

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

The key point to remember in all discussions of ObamaCare is that neither it, nor indeed the entire private health insurance “industry,” should exist. They are rent-seeking parasites, economic tapeworms. One does not improve a tapeworm; one removes it.