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Author: New Neo

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New Neo

Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.

The Obama administration had a bright suggestion for their insurance companies (they do seem to belong to the governement, don't they?):
The Obama administration said Thursday it would allow millions of Americans whose insurance policies had been canceled to purchase bare-bones plans next year, in another 11th-hour tweak to the law likely to cause consternation among health insurers. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a group of six senators in a letter that people whose policies had been canceled because of new requirements under the Affordable Care Act would be allowed to purchase "catastrophic" plans. Those plans previously had been restricted under the new law to people under the age of 30 or those who qualified for a set of specific hardship exemptions.
Basically, this means they've expanded the definition of "hardship" to include "screwed by the Obamacare regulations." Come to think of it, that makes sense. In fact, though, it's even later than the eleventh hour. Many insurers are saying this move would amplify the chaos in an already chaotic situation. The Washington Post also reports:
The Obama administration on Thursday night significantly relaxed the rules of the federal health-care law for millions of consumers whose individual insurance policies have been canceled, saying they can buy bare-bones plans or entirely avoid a requirement that most Americans have health coverage. The surprise announcement, days before the Dec. 23 deadline for people to choose plans that will begin Jan. 1, triggered an immediate backlash from the health insurance industry and raised fairness questions about a law intended to promote affordable and comprehensive coverage on a widespread basis
I have a question for Obama, Sebelius, and the rest: if the individual policies cancelled were such terrible "junk," why are you allowing those who originally had them to purchase a type of policy you defined as "junk" in the first place? Might it be because catastrophic insurance can sometimes be a valid choice for people, and not "junk" at all?

Take a look at the wording of this WaPo headline: "Obama Suffers Most From Year of Turmoil, Poll Finds." Accompanying it is this photo: sufferingObama The article goes on to describe the precipitous decline in Obama's standing in approval polls:
His position is all the more striking when compared with his standing a year ago, as he was preparing for his second inauguration after a solid reelection victory. That high note proved fleeting as the president faced a series of setbacks, culminating in the botched rollout of his Affordable Care Act two months ago.
Some may think reporters and editors are simply clumsy or indifferent writers, and sometimes they are. But much of the time they choose their words (and photos) with exquisite and subtle care. They also realize that most people only look at the headlines and photos of most articles, and that those are therefore the most important elements, and that even people who do read the article often read only the first few paragraphs. In thisWaPo article, the headline and photo have been chosen to suggest that Obama is a suffering victim---in fact, the greatest victim---of a series of unfortunate circumstances that have befallen him. He's nearly a martyr. And the text (the excerpt quoted above is the second paragraph in the piece) reinforces that idea by this phrase, "faced a series of setbacks." Passive voice; no actor.

Once-privileged New Yorkers who supported Obamacare are discovering that Obamacare means they'll be losing some of their privileges:
Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan...They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce... But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.
For this group, will the experience constitute the proverbial being "mugged by reality" and cause them to change their political affiliation? Perhaps for some, but probably not for most, since it takes a great deal to effect political change on a more permanent basis. Soon many doctors will be getting the same bad news, too:

Obamacare was pushed through Congress at high speed, without much debate and without the usual haggling. The reason was that, like thieves in a hurry to grab what they could and get out safely before being caught, Democrats were eager to move the legislation through...

Perhaps the most important Obamacare lie among many will turn out to be the one that says that the Obamacare Medicaid expansion will lead to quality health care for the people newly covered by it. Anyone who was even remotely familiar with the way Medicaid already worked was quite aware of this at the time Obamacare was passed.  Medicaid recipients were already having great difficulty getting a doctor to see them due to the low reimbursement rates. The Obamacare Medicaid expansion provides people with the trappings of care but is unlikely to be able to deliver all that much of it---unless, of course, more doctors come under the thumb of government and are forced to accept Medicaid levels of reimbursement. Oh well, doctors. They earn too much money anyway, don't they? Not in the Soviet Union they didn't. Not even in post-Soviet Russia.  Here's why [emphasis mine]:
Soviet doctors never had anything like the status and money of Western doctors. The medicine they practice was considered to be below the levels of the West, the system always suffered from shortages, and the social status of a provincial general practitioner was akin to a schoolteacher's, respectable, but modest... But under Communism, doctors at least lived no worse than anybody else -- and maybe a bit better. That has changed. Caught between an impoverished government that cannot afford universal medical care and a deep-rooted Soviet scorn for medicine-for-profit, many of Russia's doctors, especially here in the provinces, seem worn thin, out of canteen water but still marching ahead. ''When everything else took the capitalist road of development, and medicine was left on the socialist road, we got an imbalance that is killing medicine,'' said Dr. Aleksei Golland, one of a handful of private doctors in Kostroma.

The New York Times chose the following photo to illustrate a front-page article about genetic screening in Israel for a breast cancer gene: There's been a lot of flak about the photo's inclusion of the nipple---or to be more accurate, the half-aureole. But that's hardly the...

Both Democrats and Republicans have talked about the nuclear option for years---usually in favor of it when they're the majority party and against it when in the minority. But it's all been talk, till now. So why did the Democrats finally do it? In the Wall...

The insurance business would not be possible without some sort of "discrimination"---as in "the ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment," rather than "bigotry or other arbitrary distinctions." Those with greater risk are usually charged higher than average premiums or are sometimes even refused coverage in the first place, in order to keep premiums reasonable for the rest. But the Obama administration and liberals as a whole have been using the word "discrimination" in that second manner, to signify something pejorative and/or arbitrary and unfair when referring to health insurance. They don't raise a hue and cry because life insurance "discriminates" against the elderly, or because flood insurance "discriminates" against those who live in flood plains. But they refer to health insurance as unfairly discriminatory when, for example, insurers limit coverage for pre-existing conditions. Compare and contrast these slogans: "Health insurance discriminates against people with pre-existing conditions!" and "Health insurance discriminates against smokers!"  Obamacare "discriminates" against smokers but not those with preexisting conditions.

Why should the Republicans try to pull Obamacare's fat out of the fire by correcting some of its most anger-provoking consequences? DrewM at Ace of Spades HQ asks a Good question:
The GOP has to be seen doing something. That's just reality. Millions of people who played by the rules are losing their insurance and quite possibly their doctors as well. It's simply not an option for a political party to say, "Wow, that sucks for you. Should have voted for us, huh?". Campaigns are about generating future support, not punishing voters for past lack of support... Could this all go south and wind up with the GOP sharing blame for Obama's failure? Theoretically, yes. But doing nothing isn't risk free either.
I've pondered this question ever since I heard that Republicans had suggested a Keep Your Health Plan Act to undo the cancellations and make Obama stick to his promises. Why interrupt your enemy when he might already be occupied in effectively destroying himself? Then again, people are suffering, and a failure to help them will not endear Republicans to anyone except the most die-hard tough-love advocates.

NBC's Chuck Todd was the interviewer who elicited Obama's weak non-apology last Thursday. But Todd got the distinct impression that Obama "does not believe he lied" when he made those promises about keeping your plan and keeping your doctor, period. Todd adds:
I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.
John Nolte at Breitbart finds that "bordering on pathological," in light of the almost overwhelming evidence that Obama knew very well that what he said would turn out to be untrue:
Obama's brazen and reckless lying is bad enough. But if Todd is correct (and I think he is) that Obama doesn't believe or understand that he lied, that means it can and will happen again.
It's not difficult to predict that it will happen again, because this is hardly the first time it has happened. But in order to understand what's going on here, it helps to understand that Obama is a man of the left, and that he is demonstrating the tried-and-true leftist practice known as doublethink, as described by George Orwell in his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell wrote that “doublethink” requires:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies...to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

Well, well, well: it seems that with Obamacare, the insurers got some insurance against loss, too. Just another case of needing to pass the bill to find out what nuggets were hidden within its deep recesses:
If an exchange plan's performance varies in either direction by more than 3 percent, it either collects a subsidy from federal taxpayers via the Department of Health and Human Services to recoup part (50 to 80 percent) of further losses, or it has to kick back a similar share of the excess profit. Ideally, the money kicked back by profitable health plans can cover the subsidies for plans that lose. But unlike with the other two R's, there is no legal requirement that the numbers balance or limit on what can be paid. So imagine that we do enter a “death spiral” situation in which a large number of exchange health plans lose big and very few turn sizable profits...taxpayers potentially face a multi-billion dollar bailout of health insurers for losses outside the corridor. Insurers are therefore safe. Politicians who back Obamacare may not be. If insurers' costs do rise to the level that they require a taxpayer bailout, they will also be announcing massive hikes to their insurance premiums for calendar 2015.
This news may not get the widespread publicity it deserves unless the death spiral begins. But if it does, watch out.

Bill Clinton deceived the American people in a flagrant manner when he said, shaking his finger: Whatever narrow legal definition Clinton had used in his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit, virtually no one listening to what he said in that clip would think he was defining "sexual relations" in such an arcane manner. When a president addresses the American public, his words are taken with their usual meaning. And the same goes for Obama's oft-repeated pledge. It had an obvious meaning that completely resists any spin that operatives may try to put on it. "Everybody" knows what it meant, and everybody is correct.

Here's Steny Hoyer on Obama's oft-repeated promise that if you like your health insurance plan you could keep it: “We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage,” Hoyer said in response...

In a Slate article entitled "Canada has death panels, and that's a good thing," Yale law student Adam Goldenberg applauds the idea.

Canada Death Panels Slate Title Only

The "experts and wise community members" (Goldenberg's words) who make up Ontario's Consent and Capacity Board have the final say and can overrule a family's decision about whether to continue life support for an ill member if there is a dispute between the family and the patient's doctors. Who are these people, and why are they given that power? The group is a government-appointed board heavy with lawyers (and not necessarily those whose practice involves relevant areas of law), psychiatrists, and an assortment of others from the community with a great range of professions, many of them seemingly unrelated to the task at hand. All the physicians on the board appear to be psychiatrists, which is most likely a reflection of the fact that the bulk of its business (80%) involves issues of involuntary commitment to mental institutions and/or decisions about mental capacity to consent to or refuse treatment, rather than its work as a "death panel." Goldenberg notes that at present in Canada and the US, many disputes over end of life care are decided by judges:
When these family members disagree with a patient’s doctors, and when the doctors are nonetheless determined to act, the dispute generally goes to court, where it can take months or even years to resolve. That is how it works in other Canadian and American jurisdictions, anyway.
But in the US such disputes have mostly been between family members about end-of-life decisions, a la the Schiavo case.

Japan may be about to find out. As you might imagine, the "don't want to have sex" crowd in Japan doesn't include all the young people, not by a long shot. But it's a worrisome percentage, especially considering that this is an age group where the blood usually runs hot. As you also might imagine, the phenomenon involves more women than men, although the number of guys is not insignificant:
A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.
A sex and relationship counselor in Japan has this to say:
"Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard."
I very much doubt they're actually any harder than they used to be. But their rewards are a great deal less, especially in Japan, so the cost-benefit analysis is quite different. The article goes on to describe the reasons: women in the workforce whose promotion chances end at marriage and who often quit after having children because Japanese firms demand such unusually long hours of its employees, hosts of young people living with parents, ease of single living, and immersion in the world of computers rather than entering the messy fray of human contact. There are other possible reasons that the article doesn't mention. I merely list the factors that come to mind; one could easily write a book on the subject:

By now you've probably heard about the EBT card breakdown during a power outage in which shoppers at a couple of Louisiana Walmarts purposely took advantage of the situation by "buying" a huge number of groceries for amounts that greatly exceeded their EBT limits in...

(Photo: AP) In his post about health insurance executives' fear of talking on the record about the Obamacare computer problems, Prof. Jacobson offered this quote from the NY Times article:
These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”
It's awful, all right, and not just in the way they mean. The level of fear this administration has engendered is---yes, I'll use the word---unprecedented, at least in this country. And it's getting harder to tell what part of the current sycophancy of the MSM is ideological mind-melding and what part is fear, considering the way those in the media who dare to lob anything but softballs at Obama have been treated. Nixon had an enemies list, but how many people were truly afraid of him? And the people who were afraid of him actually were his enemies. With Obama, it seems that quite a few of the people who are afraid of him are his admirers and supporters, fellow-liberals and Democrats in the press and elsewhere. They're afraid to tell the truth, afraid they'll be punished for not sucking up fast enough and furiously enough. But hey, that's the way Obama got his start in politics. Remember the Alice Palmer incident?