…is it taking effect?
the Obama administration is openly admitting that their health law won’t work without the willing cooperation of people who can expect to be harmed by the law — including young people, doctors, and health industry workers.
As author Ayn Rand’s noted in her novel Atlas Shrugged:
A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.
That’s what is happening with Obamacare.
But this also means that Americans have a powerful weapon — their ability to say “no.” If the Obama administration needs our willing cooperation for their law to work, we can fight back by withdrawing that cooperation. As Dr. Megan Edison recently wrote in response to the call for her and her fellow pediatricians to funnel more patients into ObamaCare, “Primum non nocere. I will not comply.”
Nor should any of us tolerate this tyranny, particularly in light of recent events.
Thanks for the link, Rand!
Ah a teachable moment regarding The Market and people being free to choose.
Although I’m quite certain that neither Obama nor his disciples and acolytes have a mind open enough to allow learning.
So are you saying that if the ACA hits a snag, it will be because of wreckers and saboteurs and Republican governors? I am certain someone will be along to fill is in on that in 5 . . . 4 . . 3 . . . 2 . . .
No.
But this also means that Americans have a powerful weapon — their ability to say “no.” If the Obama administration needs our willing cooperation for their law to work, we can fight back by withdrawing that cooperation.
Another useful line from Atlas Shrugged: “The evil of the world is made possible only by the sanction you give it.” Or if you will, all of Chapter 4: The Sanction of the Victim
This Atlas Shrugged movie sucks. The special effects are great, but the plot is ridiculous. Couldn’t they at least come up with a believable villain?
Have you watched Part II? I thought it was so much better than Part I that I actually wish I’d never watched Part I.
🙂
That is a mean trick to play on someone Trent. Enticing him to watch the second by claiming it was better than the first…
This was also RomneyCare’s “fatal” flaw, except that it didn’t turn out to be fatal at all, because people signed up in droves.
A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide
In this metaphor urging a man to buy health insurance is “selling him suicide”, while forcing him to buy it, e.g. the way we force people to buy Medicare, is a lesser evil, murder. So Medicare for all would have been less evil than Obamacare?
You really can’t be this clueless.
Everyone has to “sign up”. It is mandated. If you don’t get insurance, then you pay a tax. We are all a part of this scheme, there is no opt out.
Rand is right that Obamacare depends on “willing cooperation”. If the healthiest people chose to pay the penalty rather than buy insurance, the system won’t work as hoped. That isn’t a concern for Medicare, say, because in that case full participation is truly mandatory: you can’t decline to pay payroll taxes.
Jim, why would people who could afford health insurance and chose not to buy it before Obamacare suddenly change now? Purchasing insurance will still be more expensive than paying the tax. (You should refer to it by its propper term, tax, because the SCOTUS said it was only constitutional as a tax)
Maybe threats of IRS audits and OSHA inspections will bring them in line…
Jim, your Pollyanna shtick wears thin after a while. You’ve been here a while. How come you still don’t understand the concerns frequently mentioned on this blog?
For example,
because people signed up in droves.
Participation is not magically a sign of a successful program. One has to consider the cost versus the benefit of the program. Not, “a lot of people showed up so it must have been successful.”
Selective Services (the registering of young, able-bodied males in the US for military conscription) could be considered successful in that it has signed up most of the adult male population at one point or another. But if it actually gets used for the purpose it was meant for, a conscription, then that’s an indication of a huge amount of failure.
A particular concern, frequently mentioned on this blog, is that employers will dump their employees off of health insurance plans. That means a lot of them will end up in the federal risk pools or uninsured. That’s a failure not a success.
And if you’re handing out money, you’ll get an artificially high participation – until the money runs out.
Participation is not magically a sign of a successful program
Read Rand’s post again. The “fatal flaw” he mentions is that Obamacare requires willing cooperation — i.e. participation. If people sign up in droves, as they did in MA, that “fatal flaw” will turn out to not be fatal after all.
employers will dump their employees off of health insurance plans. That means a lot of them will end up in the federal risk pools or uninsured. That’s a failure not a success.
FYI, the high-risk pools go away at the end of this year; they’re just a stop-gap measure until Obamacare takes full effect.
I would argue that moving people from employer-based to individual health insurance is a good thing. It means you can change jobs or start a business without it affecting your coverage. Before Obamacare that was actually the GOP position: McCain’s plan was to get rid of the employer health insurance tax subsidy, in order to push people towards individual coverage.
Don’t forget that by mandating what is covered, it is pushing up the price so that a person can not afford an individual plan regardless of job switching.
Of course if you happen to be a provider of mobile blood pressure screenings to low income populations, you should do very well for yourself despite not making people any healtier. But that is the plan right? Otherwise we wouldn’t see Democrat activist groups like ACORN setting up new “non-profits” to sign people up for Obamacare and other ways to milk the system.
And there is already a government program in place for people who lose their coverage due to job switching called Cobra.
Note who wasn’t participating, Jim. For example, if doctors aren’t playing ball, then who’s dishing out the health care? Second, why do you think that cashing checks is the same thing as “participation”. Who is paying for that “participation”?
The (Un)affordable Care Act requires not just people signing up for insurance, but insurance providers to operate, and medical providers. It requires employers to provide insurance, when continual rising prices make it unaffordable.
In the stated objective of controlling health care costs it is a predictable utter failure. If the objective is to destroy the health insurance industry, paving the way for single payer, it could well be a runaway success.
The (Un)affordable Care Act
Good news, at least if you live in California: the premiums for insurance on the Obamacare exchange there will in fact be affordable, as low as $117/mo for unsubsidized catastrophic coverage.
Remember the days when you could get good coverage for that? Obamacare wont be bringing those days back. Lowering costs is not what Obamacare is about even though that was the main argument for it.
That’s twice what it costs today.
Perhaps, Jim, you care to address a reader’s concerns about how the cost appears to have doubled?
Second, where are you getting “unsubsidized” from? The paper mentions any variation of “subsidy” only once. That tells me that they aren’t actually talking about the degree of subsidies that this insurance will get. Meaning any cost numbers they kick around will probably be wholly unrealistic.
Of course Jim didn’t address my point. What could he possibly say?
By Jim’s “logic”, three times the cost would make it three times as “affordable”!