Just wanted to let everyone know: I've delayed my vacation until next week, for a bunch of reasons:

1. It's kind of stupid to go on vacation during what I imagine will be the climax of the shutdown showdown. (Though it now appears that may go on longer.)

2. I didn't actually get guest bloggers to cover for me. I just sort of said "Bye!" and told the cobloggers "JUST HANDLE IT!!" Like a Boss. Problem is, I'm not their boss. So I can't say boss-like things like "just handle it."

So I have to contact some guest bloggers and see if they'll pitch in.

3. Yesterday was like a holiday. I'm not going on vacation during a short week. No way. I'm not a sucker.

4. I don't feel all that well so it seems stupid to go on vacation this week.

So no, I'm not working on vacation; I'm doing crappy work during a work week.

In news, the credit agency Fitch has put the US on "negative" outlook, meaning they expect a downward revision in our credit rating. So, like that helps Obama and stuff.

That big game-changing NBC poll that panicked the hell out of the GOP? Looks like a major outlier.

Meanwhile, another Deal could be in the works.

And now, an Otter and Child.

An otter is a type of weasel. (Google It.)

Below, a cool short celebrating Superman's 75th anniversary, with nods to all the different eras and incarnations of the Man of Steel. Including the Super Friends, and including the Super Pets.

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Posted by: Ace at 04:16 PM | Comments (434)
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Yeah this has been in the sidebar all day, but it's awesome.

I haven't seen this much emotion from a Kossack since Che-Che and his perpetually-sobbing daughter.

My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don't go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.

Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife's rate is gong to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.

I am canceling insurance for us and I am not paying any f**king penalty. What the hell kind of reform is this?

Oh, ok, if we qualify, we can get some government assistance. Great. So now I have to jump through another hoop to just chisel some of this off. And we don't qualify, anyway, so what's the point?

I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.

I don't know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.

What am I missing?

He notes that he will "probably" be "screamed" at by Kossacks for daring to notice that President Wonderful sort of lied about everything.

Nah:

wah! wah! I hate Obamcare! You sound like Ted Cruz.

Someone objects that this person has been a Diarist or commenter for years and years, prompting this response:

there's more to the definition of a troll than an high user number.

Hysterical, low-information broadside attacks like this sound trollish to me.

Could be a sleeper.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

So basically Kaiser raped you on renewal and tried to blame it on ACA. If this isn't proof that this whole industry needs reform nothing else is.

Everytime someone tries to say "This is actually happening to a lot of people, and it may be a real problem," they get shut up with this sort of reply:

The reason is, your policy did not have the minimum provisions required in Obamacare. Therefore, that particular policy will no longer exist under the new law.

You can't blame Obamacare because you selected substandard insurance. And remember, those who have no insurance at all will be getting a 100% premium increase. However, the vast majority of them are grateful they can finally get insurance.

You likely qualify for subsidies, if you're too stubborn to take them, that's on you.

Oh, I could quote the comments all day. Let me just suggest your read them.

Turns out Progressives really liked the idea of other people paying for the health insurance of the poor and sick.

When it turned out that many of them were those Other People, suddenly it becomes a problem.

Posted by: Ace at 03:29 PM | Comments (317)
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This seems significant enough for a new post, even though I normally would have added it to the last one as an update.

Well this is getting worrisome.

Then That's On You, Bitch:

Update: "Dead."

Posted by: Ace at 01:56 PM | Comments (683)
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And which plan will this be? I don't know, but I think this Costa piece outlines the current shape of things.

The medical device tax repeal is out, due to demands of... Tea Party aligned members, who called the repeal of the tax a sop towards "crony capitalism."

The part about inflicting ObamaCare on government workers is now off the table, except as regards Congressmen themselves. Their staffs shall continue to enjoy a specially created Caste, in which they enjoy special privileges and immunities.

On the other fronts, the majority of the Republican conference is mostly united. They’re okay with extending the debt limit and funding the government, and they like the idea of broader budget talks later this year. The’ve also agreed to tinker with Boener’s proposed dates. Instead of opening the government through early 2014, they’ll do it through December 15, and they’ll exend the debt ceiling through February 7. “This is our plan,” explains a House leadership staffer. “It’s imperfect and small and we want much more, but it’s our plan, not the Senate’s. We think it’s got a pretty good shot.”

I personally think it's folding time. We didn't get the breaks needed to win anything here.

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (363)
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First up, via @benk84, who spends his mornings Bringing It and then Brings It in the afternoon as well, a former NHS director has died after her operation was cancelled four times. (Note: A commenter alerts me that this article is from two years ago. I missed that, but it's still a useful point. Let's call this a "flashback.")

I'll say one thing for the NHS: At least it traps its Ruling Class in its baleful machinery, as well as the smallfolk.

Margaret Hutchon, a former mayor, had been waiting since last June for a follow-up stomach operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex.

But her appointments to go under the knife were cancelled four times and she barely regained consciousness after finally having surgery.

Her devastated husband, Jim, is now demanding answers from Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust - the organisation where his wife had served as a non-executive member of the board of directors.

He said: 'I don't really know why she died. I did not get a reason from the hospital. We all want to know for closure. She got weaker and weaker as she waited and operations were put off.'

There's some irony there, of course. But there's more irony coming.

Megan McArdle, meanwhile, writes that the poor implementation of ObamaCare will increase the likelihood that it not only destroys itself, but, more ominously, the entire American health insurance industry.

Here's why. ObamaCare relies upon hidden taxes to pay for the insurance for the poor. They avoided a direct tax because they didn't want the public to see it. Instead, ObamaCare has been sold as "only" imposing a cost of $340 billion (over ten years) on America.

This is a lie. Not only will that direct cost be 2 or 3 times as high, in reality, but that acknowledged cost is only part of the taxing mechanism to pay for insurance for the poor.

The other mechanism is, of course, forbidding insurers from imposing high costs on those who have already become sick and need their medical bills paid for by a third party.

Now, how can an insurer "insure" against not a risk but an actual fact? That is, it's one thing to insure against a 1-in-1,000 risk that any healthy adult will become seriously ill in a year and rack up medical costs in excess of, say, $100,000. It's fairly cheap to do that, as the $100,000 cost (let's say) only costs $100 per year to insure against ($100,000 cost at a 1-in-1000 rate equals an expected cost of $100 per person; add in overhead and salaries and profit and such).

But what if the odds of someone becoming that expensively sick are not 1 in 1000, but rather 1 in 1? Well then the cost of carrying that person's medical bills is simply the full $100,000 -- plus overhead, salaries, and profit. Ah, forget profit. There will be no profit here. This is straight-up loss.

Now, if insurance companies were simply forced to pay for non-customers' health care bills, they'd simply go bankrupt. So instead, what they're allowed to do -- demanded to do, actually -- is jack up rates for the healthy in order to underwrite the costs of the sickly.

But note that that hidden subsidy -- the carefully hidden tax in ObamaCare -- only brings in money if the young and healthy actually enroll, and pay those exorbitant not-so-hidden taxes on their health insurance.

McArdle has a fear or possibly a prediction: In addition to the straight up undo economic burden of carrying health "insurance" -- where you're now not just insuring yourself, but straight-up paying for the uninsurable, and it's all hidden in the new improved Skyrocketing Rate Structure imposed by your insurer (but really imposed by Obama) -- the massive difficulty and frustration of actually signing up for this economically-ruinous boondoggle will further discourage the young and healthy from entering the system to subsidize the older and sicker, thus exposing not only ObamaCare to failure, but the insurance companies themselves to bankruptcy.

If the exchanges donÂ’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare -- and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market. The reason that the exchanges were so important was that they were needed to attract young, healthy people into the insurance system. The worry was that if insurance is hard to buy -- if you have to do your own comparison shopping and then call the insurance company, and fax in some paperwork and two years of tax returns -- that the young and the healthy simply wonÂ’t do it. Sick people and old people who were getting huge subsidies -- and maybe the ability to buy insurance on the private market for the first time in a long while -- would overcome any obstacles, because if youÂ’re spending $15,000 a year on health care, itÂ’s worth a lot of your time to make sure that you have insurance. But if your biggest annual health-care expense is contact lens solution, you may just decide to skip it and pay the fine.

The administration estimates that it needs 2.7 million young healthy people on the exchange, out of the 7 million total expected to apply in the first year. If the pool is too skewed -- if it’s mostly old and sick people on the exchanges -- then insurers will lose money, and next year, they’ll sharply increase premiums. The healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them. Rinse and repeat and you have effectively destroyed the market for individual insurance policies. It’s called the “death spiral,” and the exchanges, like the mandate, were designed to keep it from happening.

Without the exchanges, the death spiral seems almost assured.

@johnekdahl also notes that Obama, by demanding that insurance cover "kids" up to 26 years old on their parents' plan, has further depleted the the number of young and healthy enrollees from its subsidy-farming operations.

Andy (@theh2) notes this:

One more thought along those lines: the pre-existing condition bar means insurance companies can't deny coverage. But to keep people from opting out of insurance and waiting to get coverage when they're sick they're forced to pay a penalty (that's a tax -- CJ Roberts).

Is that penalty paid to the insurance companies to make them whole for the impact of adverse selection driven by the plan design? Hell no, it goes to the government.

The insurance companies cut their own throats when they signed onto this.

McArdle argues that if this thing is to work at all -- something she doubts even under best-case circumstances -- it is absolutely necessary to delay ObamaCare in order to reboot it.

But of course the Democrats will not permit that.

So there's the final irony: ObamaCare itself contains its own Death Panel. And the Bureaucratic Overseers of the Death Panel that will euthanize ObamaCare are Barack Obama, Kathleen Sebelius, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

By the way, McArdle's piece contains far more than I've excerpted, and I suggest you Read the Whole Thing.

Posted by: Ace at 12:02 PM | Comments (338)
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Ah, now I understand why they didn't charge him with sexual battery, of which he is clearly guilty.

Answer: They probably did, but he refused to plead guilty to anything involving "sexual" in the charge. So they probably negotiated this false imprisonment/battery plea with him as something that would hurt, but that he would agree to, because he still claims he Never Touched Nobody and If He Did It Was On Accident.

Stuff about the headlocks and "making people uncomfortable" is all but admitted; he claims, though, that he never had any intention of Touching The Boobies.

So there's the answer to that crazy mystery.

Filner could have been sentenced to three years in prison for the felony false imprisonment charge. The technical term refers to restraining or otherwise detaining someone against their will -- it reaches a "felony" level when violence and other factors come into play.

Under the agreement, Filner will serve probation for three years and "home confinement" for three months. He will be barred from public office, prohibited from voting while on probation, and forced to surrender part of his pension.

He'll also be compelled to undergo treatment, under threat of jail time. Fines and other fees will be determined at his sentencing hearing, set for Dec. 9.

Thanks to @johnekdahl.

Posted by: Ace at 11:19 AM | Comments (161)
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I don't know. I thought I'd keep this just to twitter, as it's so insignificant.

While the White House continues avoiding questions from anyone suspected of wishing to ask an actual question, it has invited Mediaite's ridiculous slow-witted shill Tommy Christopher to come to Court and play the Fool for the courtiers.

“A few years ago, I was uninsured and I wasn’t able to get insurance,” Christopher said of a time when he was a freelance reporter. “Is there a chance the president would be willing to delay Obamacare for a year if Republicans would agree to delay heart attacks for a year?”

Carney replied that the White House believes that the ACA needs to be fully implemented. Christopher noted that he has been able to access the health care exchanges online.

“I was talking to my mom this morning,” Christopher continued, “and she asked me to ask you to please open the government back up again.”

Comically Evasive Mouthpiece Jay Carney really sweated Tommy Christopher's three (3! yes, 3!) probing questions.

At some point fellatio jokes just won't cut it, and you have to up your game into blumpkin jokes.
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Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (223)
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She offered a foreign policy attack on Joe Biden at a speech before, get this, the National Association of Convenience Stores.

No ears reported any mention of whatever 2016 ambitions Clinton might have. But state Rep. Tom Taylor, R-Dunwoody, said the former first lady dropped a huge hint. "I know sheÂ’s running for president now, because toward the end, she was asked about the Osama bin Laden raid. She took 25 minutes to answer," Taylor said. "Without turning the knife too deeply, she put it to [Vice President Joe] Biden."

Time and time again, Taylor said, Clinton mentioned the vice president's opposition to the raid, while characterizing herself and Leon Panetta, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as the action's most fierce advocates.

Well, I guess she managed to answer the question that no one else can, What Exactly Are Hillary Clinton's Accomplishments?

Answer: She has accomplished becoming slightly more intelligent and decisive than Joe Biden, a mentally challenged adult who loves trains, hugs, and smiling.

And casual ethnic slurs.

Here's a Hillary! Accomplishment: She Got a Parking Ticket in London. Her car was illegally parked in a car-park, without paying, and a traffic warden (that's what they're called in England I guess) insisted on writing her up for an 80 pound fine despite her five Secret Service agents flashing badges and unsuccessfully trying to pull rank.

This isn't a big thing but it does illustrate an underlying mentality, that those at the top of the Ruling Class feel utterly free of the laws that apply to the little people.

This, in turn, makes them overly eager to pass laws, knowing that they will only apply to the little people.

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Comments (252)
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Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or the sequel, actually, 2010? In that it was revealed that the supercomputer HAL had gone psychotic because he had been required to lie to his crew members, which directly violated his core mission to tell the truth.

Avik Roy writes that that is a major problem with 404Care.

They don't want people to see the prices of the policies -- because that would cause a politically-unpopular sticker shock, as people saw how much rates are skyrocketing.

Instead of showing the plans' prices, they first collect all of your financial information so they can determine your subsidy level, which allows them (in theory; the system doesn't work) to show not the price of the plan, but rather the price of the plan as reduced by the subsidy.

That step about collecting all your financial information, then swarming it all back to the central hub, then calculating a subsidy, is the part that's causing the main bottlenecks on the user side now. (But note: There are lots of problems on the insurer's side, too, as the post will discuss later.) Showing the costs of policies would be no problem, as various e-insurance referral sites demonstrate a thousand times per hour.

But they were determined to hide the cost of ObamaCare from the people, and the system, like HAL, has had a breakdown.

This political objective—masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans—far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly. Think about it the other way around. If the “Affordable Care Act” truly did make health insurance more affordable, there would be no need to hide these prices from the public.

Avik Roy says there's a growing "consensus" over this diagnosis, and indeed SuperHack Ezra Klein interviews an insurance industry expert who similarly suggests a deceptive motive is at the heart of the failure.

None of us had any idea that the government Web site would require security sign-ins before browsing. Why did that have to be a secret? No one will read a newspaper article about that. If it had been transparent I think most of this wouldÂ’ve been caught upfront. That really hurt them.

One thing the Obama administration has been really paranoid about is rate shock. When someone like me says thereÂ’ll be rate shock they say you have to net out the subsidies. That is a fair point. But I think what happened was when they designed their system they were so paranoid about that that they wanted to make sure people browsing got the lowest price. That required signing in so you could see subsidies. And my theory is thatÂ’s why they went to the architecture they did even though the IT systems people wanted to go another way.

He also says the system is a colossal failure on the insurers' side-- and remember, end of the day, no one has insurance unless an insurer says that person has insurance.

The insurance industry is literally receiving a handful of new enrollments from the 36 Obama administration-run exchanges. It’s really 20 or 30 or 40 each day through last week. And a good share of those enrollments are problematic. One insurance company told me, “we got an enrollment from John Doe. Then five minutes later we got a message from CMS disenrolling him. Then we got another message re-enrolling him.” On and on, up to 10 times. So insurers aren’t really sure if the enrollments they’ve got are enrollments they should have.

And remember, the insurers have automated all this. They donÂ’t have a clerk sending out a welcome letter and an enrollment card. So if you just let the computer run, it could theoretically issue a welcome letter, a cancellation letter, a welcome letter, a cancellation letter, etc. Now, theyÂ’re not doing this right now because itÂ’s all screwed up. They can manage a few dozen per day by hand. But when youÂ’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, it becomes completely unmanageable.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (384)
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As to the false imprisonment, I guess maybe the Filner Headlock? Seems a stretch but technically if you stop someone's movement and won't let that person go, it's a false imprisonment.

Super, super-technically. I don't really like that charge. If you mean sexual assault just charge him with sexual assault. What's this crap combination of false imprisonment and battery?

Former San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, driven from office by sexual harassment allegations, was charged Tuesday with felony false imprisonment and two counts of misdemeanor battery involving three women.

The felony count alleges false imprisonment "by violence, fraud, menace and deceit" but does not elaborate on the circumstances.

As part of the deal to get him to resign (and save the city the cost of a recall), the city agreed to cover the legal costs of civil suits against him... but is not obligated, Republican City Attorney Jan Goldsmith is quick to point out, to pay for his criminal defense.

Several Commenters... point out that I have no basis for saying this refers to the headlock; it could have been Filner barring the door, or keeping someone in his office with threats. It could just be that I don't know the actual facts underlying the charge.

Thunderb and Inspector A-hole also point out that stopping someone from getting away via a headlock is more than technically false imprisonment; it's false imprisonment.

I don't know about that though. I'd just charge it as a battery (an unlawful touching).

I don't know why he's not being charged with sexual battery.

Posted by: Ace at 08:27 AM | Comments (242)
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