Don's Tuesday column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   11/26/2013

Shirking, cheating to get others’ bounty

Rather than recount the lessons of the first Thanksgiving—wherein a failing, collectivist system producing starvation and poverty was replaced with private ownership and production, producing abundance—let’s apply those lessons to the collective Obamacare system. Governor Bradford wrote in his diary of the conundrum of single, healthy men versus men with wives and children under communal production. The family man alone would neither produce, nor need, any more than the single man, but would be entitled, for his family, to several times what the single young man received.

Bradford noted the resentment by young single men over the unequal distribution of what was produced by the group; women without children also resented working to help provide for women, with babies and/or children, who could not therefore work. Thievery became common as people sought a larger share of the group’s meager resources. Incentive and motivation lagged, replaced by sloth and indolence, as has happened every time people are discouraged from providing for their own needs and abundance.

You wonder how this bears on the Obamacare fiasco—the website problems are only hurdles on the way to implementation of the monumental disaster to come. It has simply to do with a ratio of three to one versus five to one: Politicians and technocratic advisors deemed it unfair that older people with quantifiably higher medical expenses should generally pay five times what younger, healthier people pay for insurance. They determined it only fair to limit premiums for older people to three times the younger person’s premium. The insurance industry engages in risk analysis over such things, just as they assign the appropriate premiums for life (or death) insurance for younger, compared to older, people. While not rocket science or brain surgery, it does follow exacting calculations.

A young healthy man will—due to higher costs under that formula, and a logical aversion to policy benefits he won’t need (like maternity care)—be inclined to disregard the “mandate.” By adjusting his withholding, he’ll not get a refund from the IRS, which will never be able to collect the fee, or “tax.” He will, rather, choose far better uses for hundreds of dollars every month, thousands of dollars every year: a car payment, a better apartment without roommates, saving for a down payment on a house or to start a business he’s dreamed of creating. Hence, the economic perversity involved in relying on younger people to pay, relatively speaking, far more than they would if the insurance market were dominated by free will, business efficiency and economic self-interest.

When I entered information in the Covered California “shop and compare” calculator, sure enough, the 27 year-old will pay about one-third what a 62 year old would pay. No insurance model could possibly be sold to the general public with such poorly calculated rates. Hence, the focus on “mandates” and providing “subsidies” to ease the burden of artificially higher premiums for a “basket” of benefits that many, if not most people, will find unnecessary.

For instance, a couple in their early 60s with a $50,000 income will have around a $1500 monthly premium; they qualify for about an $1100 subsidy from other people’s taxes. Would the people willing to pay that couple’s subsidy please write a letter to the editor so we can feel assured that the whole tax-and-spend scheme will work out financially? Who wants to step forward and offer to pay the $150 subsidy for a young couple earning $50,000 to defray their $550 monthly premium?

Then, there’s the financial corruption and “malingering” by the poorer enrollees. How’s that you ask? “James O’Keefe, the guerrilla videographer who helped bring down ACORN (the “community organizing” group that Barack Obama worked for as a lawyer and trainer), and got NPR’s president fired, is back.” (NationalReview.com, “The Truth about Navigators” 11/11) This time, his undercover investigators focused on Obamacare’s ‘Navigators,’ the nearly 50,000 people who … [per HHS] ‘will serve as an in-person resource for Americans who want additional assistance in shopping for and enrolling in plans’ on the (eventually working) Obamacare exchanges.”

Some $67 million in grants, some of which is going to a group run by ACORN’s highly controversial founder, provide the financial endowment for, among others, a National Urban League Navigator in Texas who, as a “government-paid worker (is) supposedly trained to uphold the law.” However, he was recorded advising “clients on how to lie on government forms, evade legal requirements, and ignore proper procedures.” Similar shenanigans were found in enrollment operations run by Local 100 United Labor Unions, a “New Orleans group run by ACORN founder Wade Rathke.” A little larceny to help poorer folks get other people’s money?

Regarding Covered California: their numbers are simply bogus and not reflective of actual paid enrollments; the Navigators are awarded a $58 bounty for each person enrolled; criminal records do not disqualify someone from becoming a Navigator; the people running it have “no projected model of success—(they) simply don’t know what demographic mix” or volume is required to be sustainable.

HHS Secretary Sebelius admitted, “It’s possible” that “a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them,” under questioning by Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn. What could go wrong?