Picking Apart the Health Care Takeover

Your correspondent has not heard anyone discuss the idea that the Preexisting Condition Requirement of the Health Care Takeover amounts to an "unconstitutional taking." Thus, the Fifth Amendment could provide a strong argument for overturning at least what is perhaps the most onerous provision of the Health Care Takeover:

Amendment V (1791)

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

As I wrote to my son, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, last night:

"The first form hospitals will have anyone sign when they comes into the emergency room, or are admitted generally, will be an application for a Cadillac insurance policy."

Said differently, when those who forgo health insurance and suffer that huge $700+ annual fine, hospitals and doctors will routinely have them "buy" insurance upon admission for a critical injury or illness. Ultimately, they will probably develop a standard form that combines signing over benefits and applying for insurance should the person not have it. So, "Pay an annual $795 fine; get busted up in an auto accident; sign here--your covered. Insurance company can't say no."

Given the foregoing scenario, private insurance companies will become insolvent long before Obama Care starts paying benefits. Accordingly, the preexisting condition provision will almost surely lead to the bankruptcy of, or the dramatic decline in the value of, every health insurance carrier in America. That would seem to give "standing" to the following "persons" to file suit asking for the overturn of this most onerous provision of the bill:

• Health Insurance carriers
• Stockholders of Health Insurance carriers
• Bondholders of Health Insurance carriers
• Unsecured Creditors of Health Insurance carriers
• (Conceivably) Those dumb enough to actually buy health insurance
  

The argument from the Fifth Amendment could provide a means to overturn, or at least nibble at the edges of, the Health Care Takeover.

One last point, the exact calculation of the fines remains a bit unclear to yours truly at this moment. Still, the calculations reported to date all come in well below the unsubsidized cost of my COBRA coverage.

DJ

Corn Husker Kick Back -- What to Do?

I hope everyone reading my blog has heard about the Corn Husker Kick Back and the Florida "Medicare Advantage" given in exchange for "Yes" votes on the Health Care Takeover bill by their "undecided" Senators. While we citizens can seemingly do nothing about the bill now, I think we have one card to play. Here is what I did:


Dear Senator Feinstein:

Please fight to get California the same benefits under the Health Bill as it bestows on both Nebraska and Florida.

The desire of President Obama to sign a "deficit neutral" bill should not force California into bankruptcy. The Health Bill could do just that as it pushes a big Medicaid burden onto the states. With the California economy on life support, no state needs more relief from the increased costs than ours. California has far fewer per capita resources to absorb the Bill's large unfunded Medicaid mandate. At the same time, a greater percentage of Californians than Nebraskans rely on Medicaid.

If the new Medicaid burden will give Nebraska a headache, it will give California a concussion!

In addition to pushing costs onto the states, the Health Bill takes away an important senior benefit: Medicare Advantage--except that is for seniors living in Florida. Before my late father passed away, he frequently extolled the virtues of his Medicare Advantage plan. Imagine then, the frustration that thousands of California seniors will feel when their benefits disappear. Realizing that Floridians will continue enjoying their Medicare Advantage plans will only compound that frustration. While you may not be able to undo the unfair "Florida deal;" you can at least get California the same deal.

One would expect that having an experienced, loyal and highly regarded Senator would bring significant benefits to California. Instead, your loyalty to the cause of Health Care seems to have brought Californians less value and higher taxes.


Merry Christmas to all; and to all, a good night.

DJ

The Great Health Care Takeover

As Compared to Health Insurance

During an apparently unplanned moment of candor at his press conference on July 22, 2009, President Obama seems to have accidentally “tipped his Health Care hand.” He did so by honestly answering a question from Ms. Jane Strum about how he would have handled a health care situation faced by her mother. The primary physician had recommended that her then 100-year-old mother receive a pacemaker. The cardiologist said she was too old; fortunately, a second cardiologist agreed with the primary physician. In the event, her Mom got the pacemaker; mom is still vibrant and “still kicking around” at 105.

In contrast, the President essentially told Ms. Strum that under his plan, her mother would have gotten pain pills and been told to “go home and die.” Does that last seem a bit acerbic? Perhaps one might better paraphrase the comment as, “Dr. Obama says, ‘Take two aspirin, and don’t call me in the morning--or any other time! {deleted, see addendum}.’”

President Obama insists he wants everyone “to have coverage”—an insurance term, incidentally. His answer to Ms. Strum highlights the sharp contrast between his proposed Health Care Takeover and actual “insurance”:

in·sur·ance

2. a. Coverage by a contract binding a party to indemnify another against specified loss in return for premiums paid.

More generally, for almost four thousand years, insurance has meant that one party assumed some of another party’s risk of loss in exchange for money in advance:

The Babylonians developed a system which was recorded in the famous Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BC, and practiced by early Mediterranean sailing merchants. If a merchant received a loan to fund his shipment, he would pay the lender an additional sum in exchange for the lender's guarantee to cancel the loan should the shipment be stolen. (See the History of Insurance caption in the linked article.)

Does President Obama really want everyone “to have coverage?” If that were true, the plan would spell out the all risks it was taking on, and those it was not. Moreover, since the plan forces everyone into the System, one would expect it to “cover” any and all risks now covered by our “broken, profit ridden, greed plagued, and inefficient” health insurance system. His accidental moment of candor shows that President Obama has no plan to cover all the risks currently assumed by insurance. In fact, no one can know which risks the government will cover at any given moment.

Clearly, the President has no more intention insuring anyone than he has of resigning his office. Instead, he wants to force everyone into a system of capriciously dispensed medical care; a system that will definitely include “go home and die” for some; and inferentially, “go home and suffer” for others.

Whatever you choose to call the President’s plan, please do not call it “insurance.”

==============================================================

Addendum: Reflections upon some acerbic comments

We ought to recognize that in his rather callous remark, President Obama breached an extraordinarily difficult point: an enormous percentage of a person's lifetime medical spending occurs in the last months of life. No compassionate society seems to have dealt effectively with that seemingly intractable issue; thus, Medicare is actuarially bankrupt; and European economies stagnate under almost unbearable tax burdens. At the same time, scrapping the current, admittedly flawed, essentially market based system for a "pig in a poke" patterned on flawed European models that have met with enormous difficulties does not seem wise.

A couple of acerbic terms:

• "apparently unplanned moment of candor"
  



• "accidental moment of candor"




President Obama has become well known for carefully choosing his words. Telling someone, "I would have sent your mother home to die" while trying to sell a health plan seems quite uncharacteristic of either the President or any salesperson. In addition, the comment seems clearly more candid than President Obama's typical style. Thus, while somewhat harsh, the two phrases seem fitting enough.





dj

Identity Theft Gets a Boost!

Congress should move quickly to allow businesses that protect consumers from identity theft to continue doing so.

An article in the on-line magazine Wired.com reported that Federal District Judge Andrew Guilford ruled the protection offered by LifeLock, and presumably other companies that provide a similar service, was illegal. Reading the article could give one the idea, at least in your correspondent's mind, that the judge might have wanted to protect credit-reporting agencies from competition. In doing so, he exposed millions of consumers to identity theft.

We live in an era in which businesses; including credit-reporting agencies, “routinely” lose critical identifying data belonging to millions of consumers. We have seen far too many stories about a single breach exposed information on millions of consumers. In light of that fact, Judge Guilford’s ruling seems far worse than "unfortunate."

To cite a personal experience, two companies have purchased me credit-monitoring services: one for two years; one for a single year. They did so after they, or a vendor they used, lost or compromised my personal data. While not detailed here, I did give Senator Diane Feinstein some details in a letter— regardless of your experience, I hope you will write an equivalent letter demanding action.

Please note that, so far at least, my experience pales before the nightmares suffered by tens of thousands of identity theft victims. Some have suffered financial losses following an identity theft; others have spent hundreds of hours trying recover from identity theft; many have lost both money and hours.

The fact that Experian was the plaintiff in the case particularly galled me. A couple of years ago, two of the three primary credit-reporting agencies finally agreed that I had not resided in my former wife's “post office box”! This was after several years of on and off effort on my part; albeit, probably not more than twenty or thirty hours in total.

The third credit bureau insisted that I had indeed once lived in that 6 x 6 x 18 inch space; they had verification of my residence there! Moreover, the website of that bureau provided no reasonable means to correct their error. The address presumably remains on my credit report; I have not checked in a couple of years. Hence, you can imagine my sense outrage at seeing Judge Guilford take the side of Experian, and credit bureaus generally, in the case at hand.

As the article appeared in May, 2007, Congress may have moved to correct the law, called FACTA, so that businesses may once again protect the privacy of consumers.

In the likely case that Congress has not yet acted, please consider sending your Senators and member of the House a polite email asking them to address this issue during the current session.

Clicking on the title of this post will take you to the article at Wired.com.

What’s wrong with this Picture?

Today, June 4, 2009, Yahoo news featured this headline:

"As of 9:18 a.m. PDT •
"Can Obama win Muslim hearts and minds?

"Bin Laden threat"

Presumably, the writer of the headline thought that some chance existed that President Obama , in his Cairo speech, could indeed “win (a large number of) Muslim hearts and minds,”. Keep in mind that Muslims have harbored hostility towards the West, the Jewish People, and Christians generally since at least the Crusades, the last of which ended about A.D. 1296, if not longer.

Said differently, the headline seemed to presume that the President had at least a fighting chance to achieve what one could arguably call a miracle. Let us hope the writer was not educated in the United States; however, your correspondent remains dubious about that possibility.

Fortunately, in his Cairo speech, the President cautioned everyone, worldwide:
“I know there's been a lot of publicity about this speech, but no single speech can
eradicate years of mistrust nor can I answer in the time that I have this afternoon
all the complex questions that brought us to this point.”

Perhaps someone should caution the President against the dangers of excessive humility. After all, if he keeps saying things like that, the entire world could lose all hope for the future.

OK, that last paragraph was somewhat tongue in cheek. At the same time, it did seem to capture the general tenor of the President’s words; particularly since, instead of saying, “years of mistrust,” the President should have said, “centuries of mistrust.”

The most disturbing thing about the President’s remarks was that he seemed to feel compelled to include them in the speech at all. Of course, we do have that disturbing headline. Still, including the lines must say something about the President's view of the American People, the people of the world in general, his own powers of persuasion, or some combination of the three.

Regardless of his view of the hearers of his speech, one hopes the President believed his own cautionary words.

DJ

A Song for Our Time

Recently, some good person decided they needed my car's AM antenna more than I did. The inability to listen to my usual "right-wing, fascistic, insensitive claptrap" has left me floundering in the world of FM. Still, the FM Band has reminded me of an old truth: Country Music is Truly the Last Refuge of Rock and Roll. More importantly, I discovered "a song for our time;" albeit, a six year old song.

Years ago, I asked a musician friend to write a song with a similar, but more strident theme; to my knowledge, he never did. I took a shot; but, I am no song writer. Darryl Worley has indeed written "a song for our time." Click on the title of this post to hear 30 seconds of his song; and you will understand what I mean.

(The song should start automatically, probably in a new window. If a window opens but nothing plays, pick sample number one.)

I do hope you click the link; maybe buy the song; and, of course, pass along a link to this post. If the song is "old news" to you, you might want to pass it on anyway just to jar someone's memory. As for me, perhaps I need to listen to music on FM more than once or twice a year. After I scrape together ninety-nine cents, I may just download the single.

DJ

On Friday, August 24, 2009, General David Patraeus suggested that civilian ship owners retain armed guards to protect their ships. His remarks re-kindled my interest in the possibilities of using "Q-Ships" to deter pirates.

Q-Ships were used during the previous two World Wars to disrupt enemy merchant vessels. Whether categorized as lightly armed warships made to look like merchant ships, or simply heavily armed merchantmen, Q-Ships normally flew neutral flags until they came upon an enemy ship. Then, they "showed their 'true colors'" and opened fire or took a prize.

Today, the Navy could lease container vessels for use as Q-Ships. Armor plated containers could provide "modular" means to add "specialized functions" and equipment: weapons, protection for the those manning the weapons, camera platforms for those gathering criminal evidence and, of course, public defenders to represent any captured pirates.

One wonders how keen on ship hijacking these young men would remain after two or three intended victims turned out to have "cargoes" of "quad-.50" machine guns, "obsolete" M-60 tanks, a few wire-guided anti-tank rockets, and a platoon of United States Marines.

While the Navy would probably feel an obligation to pick up any survivors from crippled speed boats, it would not trouble me if the Navy "left them where it found (or last saw) them." The Navy could simply say that there was not enough evidence to hold the survivors for trial; hence it left them alone--after, of course, sinking their boats.

Despite my tongue-in-cheek remarks, Q-ships seem to deserve a trial.

DJ