Monday, October 28, 2013

Why Obama Should Be Freaked Out Over Obamacare

It's worse than we know, this is the easy part, and millions of Americans could be hurt.

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

President Obama said Monday he's "frustrated" by the disastrous launch of an online computer marketplace for Obamacare. Here are five reasons why frustration isn't enough. He should be frightened.
1. It's worse than his team has let on. The White House has tried to position the failed first days of Obamacare as mere hiccups caused by the site's popularity. Obama called them "kinks." An administration spokesman told the Washington Post on Sunday that the "main driver of the problem is volume." This is intentionally misleading.
The White House has heard complaints from insurance companies, consumers, and health policy experts about issues embedded deeply in the online system. For example: inaccurate information provided to people about federal tax credits; low-income people erroneously told they don't qualify for Medicaid; and insurance companies getting confusing information about who has signed up.
The administration refuses to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange, the key metric for determining how well the online service is working in states that didn't set up their own exchanges. There are two possible explanations for the Obama administration's unconscionable lack of transparency. Their process is so screwed up that they don't have the data, which would be embarrassing. Or they have the data – and it's embarrassing.

2. This is the easy part. Finding and motivating people to take action online is the founding strength of Team Obama. This is what they do best. Managing a complex law is a different matter, and it's fair to question whether the president and his team are up to it.
How do you convince healthy young Americans to pay for insurance they may not need in order to fund the program? Do companies shed workers and working hours to avoid coming under the law? Are people with cheap catastrophic plans forced to pay more in the exchanges? Tricky questions likes these will soon make the hard art of website design look like fingerpainting. "The online federal health care exchange, the heart of the Obamacare project, is such a rolling catastrophe that it may end up creating a major policy fiasco immediately rather than eventually," wrote Ross Douthat in a New York Times column titled, "Obamacare, Failing Ahead of Schedule."
3. It reflects poorly on the president. Nobody expects the chief executive to be reviewing computer code or hosting East Room "hackathons." But this falls on him. The CEO of a corporation or country is uniquely responsible for making sure the team is on task, and he or she is ultimately responsible if it's not. In Obama's case, did he demand thorough updates on the progress of the site? If so, did he ask the right questions? Did he put the right people on the job in the first place? Given the horrid first days of Obamacare, the answer to at least one of those questions must be "no."
4. It reflects poorly on government. The public's faith in government is at a record low, just as Obama is fighting Republicans on several fronts over the size and power of the federal bureaucracy. His administration needs to rapidly improve the online exchanges to stand any chance of convincing, say, young Americans to pay for insurance they don't think they need. Beyond Obamacare, the Democratic Party's reputation for competency is as stake. The cost of the site is already $394 million, a massive amount compared to private-sector CMS work, and sure to grow.
5. It could hurt Americans. For decades, politicians in both parties pledged to ease one of the leading causes of anxiety in the post-industrial age, the lack of affordable health care. Nearly 50 million Americans are uninsured, or about 15.4 percent of the population. Millions more are underinsured. Obamacare, enacted three years ago over the objections of Republicans, may or may not be the answer. But, as the White House likes to remind Republicans, it's the law and it deserves a shot.
How sadly ironic it would be if Obamacare is denied a fair shake because of its namesake's mismanagement.
"The Affordability Care Act is not just a website," Obama said Monday, "it's much more." True to a point, but the website is critical to the law's purpose: helping millions of Americans bargain for better health care. Dismissing the extent of the problem and reminding voters that Republicans fought the law -- which is essentially all Obama did in his Rose Garden remarks -- is a deflection, which shouldn't be confused with implementation or governing.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/why-obama-should-be-freaked-out-over-obamacare-20131021

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Government? Who needs it: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

We should slash government budgets to deal with debt.

While Washington, and the press, have been in an uproar over the government shutdown and the debt-limit negotiations, the debt itself has continued to climb. And that inexorable tide is going to cost us, eventually. As economist Herbert Stein once observed, something that can't go on forever, won't. And this can't go on forever. From this there are two lessons.
How bad has it gotten? In the past two years, the debt limit has grown twice as much as the economy. Can that go on forever? I doubt it very much.
As Niall Ferguson notes, while politicians crow that the deficit has dropped -- from super-enormous to merely really, really gigantic -- every year that we're in deficit adds to the debt. And the long-term trends are bad: "A very striking feature of the latest Congressional Budget Office report is how much worse it is than last year's. A year ago, the CBO's extended baseline series for the federal debt in public hands projected a figure of 52% of GDP by 2038. That figure has very nearly doubled to 100%. A year ago the debt was supposed to glide down to zero by the 2070s. This year's long-run projection for 2076 is above 200%. In this devastating reassessment, a crucial role is played here by the more realistic growth assumptions used this year."
Ah, yes. Growth. We've been pretty short of that over the last several years, as businesses -- even pro-Obama enterprises such as Google and Apple -- park increasing amounts of money overseas, unwilling to be subject not only to high U.S. taxes but, even worse, to the high levels of regulation of which Obamacare is only the most famous.
Something that can't go on forever, won't. Therefore, we won't keep borrowing more and more forever, with stagnant economic growth. So that's one lesson. But the other lesson can be found in the government shutdown: How many people really noticed?
The answer, of course, is so few that the Obama administration was forced to gin up a show with "Washington Monument" strategy efforts like closing war memorials and national parks, cutting off death benefits for dead troops, and the like in an effort to get people to care. These efforts seem mostly to have succeeded in driving Obama's poll numbers down to 37% in an AP poll last week, as a majority of Americans concluded -- correctly -- that he was putting his personal political interests ahead of the nation's.
The big lesson of the shutdown is that -- in a time when so-called "draconian cuts" usually refer to mere decreases in the rate of growth of spending on programs -- America was able to do without all the "non-essential" government workers just fine. (The same AP poll cited above says that 80% have felt no impact from the shutdown; a majority also oppose increasing the debt limit.) Turns out that most of those nonessential workers really are non-essential. And it's a safe bet that some of those who stayed on the job -- like the National Park Service people who chased veterans away from an open-air memorial -- could be done without, too, in a pinch. Under the shutdown, new regulations also slowed to a trickle, suggesting that we can do just fine without those, too.
With these lessons learned, here's my budget proposal: An across-the-board cut of 5% in every government department's budget line. (You can't convince me -- and you'll certainly have a hard time convincing voters -- that there's not 5% waste to be found in any government program.) Then a five-year freeze at that level. Likewise, a one-year moratorium on new regulations, followed by strict limits on new regulatory action: Perhaps a rule that all new business regulations won't have the force of law until approved by Congress.
This approach would drastically cut the deficit, and as the economy grew, our debt-to-GDP ratio would improve over time instead of steadily worsening. (And, with a guarantee of reduced spending and regulation, economic growth would probably also take off.)
Will we actually see anything like this? Alas, probably not. Smaller government and less regulation mean fewer opportunities for graft and for the personal and institutional aggrandizement that mean even more than money in Washington. But my proposal is what our leaders would do if their necks were on the line. Since it's only our necks at stake, though, I'm not very hopeful.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/10/15/government-shutdown-washington-column/2976849/

How Crazy Are the Democrats?

by John Hinderaker in Democrats, Liberals

The Democrats have achieved a public relations coup that any ministry of propaganda would be proud of. Worried that the United States is $17 trillion in debt? Radical! Unconcerned about deficits that pile up as far as the eye can see? Responsible! Unhappy about an anemic economy in which a generation of young people struggles to find full-time employment? Traitor! Content with record levels of poverty and non-employment? Moderate! Want to get rid of a law that is opposed by most Americans, decimates the economy and is patently unworkable? Crazy! Delighted at the sight of millions of Americans losing their health insurance and being demoted to part-time employment? Public-spirited!
Only our one-party press makes this topsy-turvy world possible. But there is, in fact, craziness abroad in the land. We see it at MoveOn.org, where Democratic Party activists have started multiple petitions demanding that John Boehner and Ted Cruz be arrested for sedition. At least one of these petitions, as Byron York has noted, has been signed by tens of thousands of Democrats. The left has always been totalitarian at its core, and I really do think that if they could get away with it, liberals would try to criminalize disagreement with their policies. Another incentive to hold the House in 2014!
It isn’t just nutty activists, either. On MSNBC, Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen said of House Republicans, “we take an oath to support the country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and these are the domestic enemies.” But really, how shocking is that? Over the last few weeks, just about every prominent Democrat has described House Republicans as terrorists.

Then we have CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, another loyal Democrat, who, at the end of a long screed, assured his television audience that conservatives “love America in theory, and hate it in fact.” Which must be what makes us traitors and terrorists.

Given that level of intemperance, it is no surprise that one Democratic Party activist on Twitter has already published Ted Cruz’s home address in Houston and urged violence against Cruz. That particular threat was public, but no doubt there have been others that have not been reported.

President Obama says that he hopes the Republican “fever” of opposition to his policies will break soon. There is indeed a fever infecting our body politic, but I think Obama has his eyes on the wrong patient.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/10/how-crazy-are-the-democrats-2.php

ObamaCare Exchange Website Also Offers Voter Registration For Some Reason

If you have the tech savvy and patience to sign up for ObamaCare, why not register to vote at the same time? By the way, don’t forget which party is giving you “free” healthcare. Wink.
We now come to the true purpose of the Affordable Care Act which can be summed up in the simple question: What does healthcare have to do with registering to vote?
The MacIver Institute reports…

Obamacare Exchange Website Asks Applicants to Register to Vote
The Obamacare exchange website is complicated to use and has seen more than a few glitches since it officially opened on October 1st, but the MacIver Institute has found that once you get through the application process, the website asks individuals to register to vote.
The MacIver Institute was trying to use HealthCare.gov to compare rates on the Wisconsin exchange on Thursday and Friday. This requires an individual to fill out an application before the rates can be seen. Unfortunately, the website crashed before premium rates could be compared.
However, prior to the website crashing, which was not the first time during the application process, it was discovered that the Obamacare website actually tries to register individuals to vote.
The link is optional, but the question remains, what does registering to vote have to do with signing up for Obamacare?

Here’s a screen capture from the report.

Democrats are always quick to claim there’s no such thing as voter fraud, unless a Republican wins of course, but this development should set off alarm bells for all American voters.
There are already reports of fraud within the ObamaCare exchanges.

http://americanglob.com/2013/10/16/obamacare-exchange-website-also-offers-voter-registration-for-some-reason/

California's Green Trade War

Sacramento uses carbon mandates to punish out-of-state businesses.

Environmental policies are often economic protectionism in green clothing. A case in point is California's low-carbon fuel standard, whose constitutionality is being challenged in federal court. It's also a case study of the incredible contortions of green policy-making today.
California's low-carbon fuel mandate requires the state, by 2020, to reduce the "carbon intensity" of its transportation fuels by 10%. Carbon intensity is a fuel's "life-cycle emissions," which include the energy needed to produce and transport it. You guessed it: California fuels tend to qualify as less carbon intense than imported out-of-state fuels because they're produced closer to market and use "cleaner" (i.e., renewable) sources of power.
But there's one big exception: Some California-based oil that is extracted using "thermally enhanced" techniques produces lots of emissions. But the state's oil industry is a key source of employment in inland areas. What to do? The California Air Resources Board came up with a formula that assigns older sources of crude oil, no matter its production technology, the same score.
What this means is that California's crude oil now rates the same as Alaskan light—even though California's actual carbon intensity is four times as high. Yet another convolution puts oil recovered from Canada's Alberta tar sands at a ratings disadvantage in California.
Now comes the kicker: By the California Air Resources Board's own admission, the state's fuel standard "does not result in reductions in greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale" because more carbon-intense fuels will be sold elsewhere anyway.
So what's the point of all this? The goal is to corner the market for "advanced" biofuels, such as soybean oil, landfill waste and even animal lard. This stuff will be in high demand when the U.S. EPA ratchets up the federal Renewable Fuel Standard. California subsidized the biofuels industry by $23 million this year.
The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers and other affected parties have sued the state for violating the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause by discriminating against out-of-state fuels. In 2011, federal Judge Lawrence O'Neill of the Eastern District of California ruled that the fuel mandate is unconstitutional and issued a preliminary injunction.
Then a three-judge panel of the hyper-liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in. It vacated the district's court order, arguing that it should have considered whether the local benefits of controlling climate change exceeded the burden on interstate commerce. As argued by Justice Ronald Gould, California could see "its labor force imperiled by rising temperatures, and its farms devastated by severe droughts" due to rising emissions.
By this expansive logic, California could impose restrictions on virtually any out-of-state product on the pretext of reducing carbon emissions as the state defines them. France's wine producers take note.
Last week, the plaintiffs in the case requested en banc review by the Ninth Circuit. If the full appellate court rules that the climate trumps the Commerce Clause, the U.S. Supreme Court may have to bring California back to earth.

http://connect.freedomworks.org/news/view/405799?destination=node%2F405799

Saturday, October 26, 2013

The House GOP Voted 11 Times To Reopen The Government

by
Matt Vespa

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the Republicans DID compromise to avoid a shutdown. They were going to keep the government open, but asked that Obamacare be delayed. Yes, even Planned Parenthood would get their annual funding from the government. Senate Democrats under Harry Reid said no. Here are the eleven times the House GOP voted to reopen the government – but were blocked by Senate Democrats and the president. Yet, it’s conservatives who are the ones being obstructionist.

1. Roll Call 478 on H.J. Res. 59 (September 20, 2013)
Earlier in September, House Republicans voted to fund the government at current spending levels while strengthening our economy and protecting millions of American families by defunding ObamaCare.

Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.
2. Roll Call 497/498 on H.J. Res 59 (September 28, 2013)
With hours left until the government ran out of funding, House Republicans voted to keep the government open at current spending levels while protecting our economy by delayingthe glitch-filled ObamaCare for one year and repealing the tax on medical devices like pacemakers and children’s hearing aides.
Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it, causing the government shutdown.
3. Roll Call 504 on H.J. Res 59 (September 30, 2013)On September 30, the House GOP again voted to fund the government at current spending levels, while ensuring that Congress doesn’t receive special treatment under ObamaCare, and delaying ObamaCare’s individual mandate.
Again, Senate Democrats killed the measure in the Senate, and President Obama threatened to veto.
4. Roll Call 505 on H.J. Res 59 (September 30, 2013)
That same night, Republicans in the House voted to request a formal House-Senate conference, so Democrats and Republicans could sit down at the table and negotiate to resolve their differences.
Senate Democrats defeated that resolution, and President Obama threatened to veto it.
5. Voice Vote on Provide Local Funding for the District of Columbia Act (October 2, 2013)To help reopen parts of the government while Democrats refused to negotiate, House Republicans passed H.J. Res. 71 by voice vote, which would have restored funding for the government of the District of Columbia.
Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.
6. Roll Call 513 on Open Our Nation’s Parks and Museums Act (October 2, 2013)
To help reopen parts of the government while Democrats refused to come to the table and work out differences, the House GOP voted to restore funding for the nation’s parks and museums – including the World War Two Memorial in Washington that has been closed to visiting veterans.
Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.
7. Roll Call 514 on Research for Lifesaving Cures Act (October 2, 2013)To help restore funding for vital cancer research and other lifesaving innovations, the House GOP voted to reopen the National Institute of Health.
Senate Democrats blocked the bill (see Harry Reid ask a reporter “why would we want to do that?” when asked if he would vote to resume funding for children’s cancer treatment), and President Obama threatened to veto it.
8. Roll Call 516 on Pay Our Guard and Reserve Act (October 3, 2013)
In order to make sure that the government shutdown doesn’t get in the way of paying our National Guard and Reserve, the House GOP voted for the Pay Our Guard and Reserve Act.
Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.
ise to America’s Veterans Act (October 3, 2013)The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for vital veterans benefits and services during the government shutdown.
Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.
10. Roll Call 522 on National Emergency and Disaster Recovery Act (October 4, 2013)The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure Americans have access to emergency responders in the case of a disaster.
Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.
11. Roll Call 524 on Nutrition Assistance for Low-Income Women and Children Act (October 4, 2013) The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for nutritional assistance for nearly 9 low-income million mothers and children.
Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

Given how the president’s approval rating has sunk to historic lows, this shutdown gives Obama a way to re-energize his stalled legislative agenda. He wasted the most precious moments of his second term on a gun control push that was never going to pass, and he was stuck in neutral until the shutdown. Sadly, there are only a few congressional races that are competitive, the next election is thirteen months away, and Obamacare’s rollout was disastrous. Hence, everyone will forget about the shutdown – and the focus will shift to Obamacare’s impact on the economy.
Conservatives have an avenue to claim victory. The only question is whether they can package it properly to resonate with the electorate. Additionally, we have to worry about some of the more establishment Republicans in the senate surrendering to liberals.
Nevertheless, the House GOP, along with the Democrats, voted to reopen the government – and Obama said no.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/10/15/the-house-gop-voted-11-times-to-reopen-the-government/

Obamacare Needs a Drop-Dead Date

ByMegan McArdle

Exactly how bad are things on the federal health-care exchanges? The working assumption among most journalists, including me, is that they would be fixed in a few weeks -- that is, by the end of this week. But yesterday’s New York Times brought a deeply reported piece from Robert Pear, Sharon LaFraniere and Ian Austen. There is too much information in the piece for an excerpt to do it justice, so I’ll summarize, with some editorial comments -- but you should read the whole thing to get the full flavor:
-- One person familiar with the project says it’s only about 70 percent of the way there, and has heard estimates of somewhere between two weeks to two months to fix it. As a programmer I know points out, “two weeks to two months” is the programming equivalent of “40 days and 40 nights”: “A long time, but I have no way of knowing how long.” When I used to hear estimates like that, I used to assume it would be coming in on the late end of that range, earliest.

About Megan McArdle»

-- The administration delayed writing major rules until after the 2012 election, because it didn’t want to give Republicans any ammunition for their campaign. (This actually was noted at the time: “When it comes to health care, delaying regulations could help the president politically by avoiding discussion of the controversial health reform law. But that makes life difficult for states and industries that need to prepare for the coming changes,” wrote the National Journal. But most of us didn’t understand just how badly this was affecting implementation.)
-- Despite evidence to the contrary, the administration kept insisting that everything was absolutely on track to launch Oct. 1.
-- This passage is so extraordinary that it requires excerpting:

“Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.”

Suddenly, two months sounds optimistic.
-- The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services inexplicably decided to take on the role of central project manager itself, assuming responsibility for integrating all the various software pieces they’d subcontracted, rather than assigning that role to a lead contractor. CMS is not known to maintain a pool of crack programming talent with extensive project management experience that can be deployed to this sort of task.
-- Henry Chao, the Health and Human Services Department's digital architect of the insurance marketplace, seems to have been sounding the alarm bells internally. (He certainly was externally; he famously told a group of insurers in March that “I’m pretty nervous -- I don’t know about you. … Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”) Chao was worried that the systems wouldn’t work, a concern to which higher-ups apparently responded by basically telling him in effect that, according to the Times piece, “failure was not an option.”
-- Neither the consumer side nor the insurer side is working. A New York Times researcher made more than 40 attempts from Oct. 1 to Oct. 12 to log in, with no luck. Meanwhile, the Times confirms Bob Laszewski’s report that insurers are getting virtually no usable data from the exchanges. As the Times puts it, “just a trickle of the 14.6 million people who have visited the federal exchange so far have managed to enroll in insurance plans, according to executives of major insurance companies who receive enrollment files from the government. And some of those enrollments are marred by mistakes. Insurance executives said the government had sent some enrollment files to the wrong insurer, confusing companies that have similar names but are in different states. Other files were unusable because crucial information was missing, they said.”
Insurers began warning in 2012 that they were worried about these systems making their delivery dates, a concern that the Government Accountability Office echoed in June. Now we know why: The systems weren’t on track to meet their delivery dates.
This is stunning. It’s far worse than I imagined, and I am pretty cynical. The law’s supporters are engaged in some high-speed blamestorming: It’s the Republicans' fault for not giving the law more money, or it’s the fault of Republican governors who didn’t build their exchanges, or maybe it’s one of the vendors -- CGI, the firm with the largest contract, is the most favored target, but at various times, the administration has clearly been teeing up to blame Experian or Oracle. Or perhaps the fault lies in federal procurement rules, which prevented the government from getting the right kind of staff and service. A lot of that shows up in the article; there’s a long prelude about the political barriers that the administration faced. But ultimately, the litany of mistakes that the administration made overwhelms these complaints.

(read the rest at link): http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-14/obamacare-needs-a-drop-dead-date.html

Why climate change is good for the world

Don't panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm

by Matt Ridley

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.
At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.
There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today — and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends.
To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3˚C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8˚C of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century — if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensis, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it’s a long way off.
Now Prof Tol has a new paper, published as a chapter in a new book, called How Much have Global Problems Cost the World?, which is edited by Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, and was reviewed by a group of leading economists. In this paper he casts his gaze backwards to the last century. He concludes that climate change did indeed raise human and planetary welfare during the 20th century.
You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.
Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.
It will still be 1.2 per cent around 2050 and will not turn negative until around 2080. In short, my children will be very old before global warming stops benefiting the world. Note that if the world continues to grow at 3 per cent a year, then the average person will be about nine times as rich in 2080 as she is today. So low-lying Bangladesh will be able to afford the same kind of flood defences that the Dutch have today.
The chief benefits of global warming include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity. It is a little-known fact that winter deaths exceed summer deaths — not just in countries like Britain but also those with very warm summers, including Greece. Both Britain and Greece see mortality rates rise by 18 per cent each winter. Especially cold winters cause a rise in heart failures far greater than the rise in deaths during heatwaves.
Cold, not the heat, is the biggest killer. For the last decade, Brits have been dying from the cold at the average rate of 29,000 excess deaths each winter. Compare this to the heatwave ten years ago, which claimed 15,000 lives in France and just 2,000 in Britain. In the ten years since, there has been no summer death spike at all. Excess winter deaths hit the poor harder than the rich for the obvious reason: they cannot afford heating. And it is not just those at risk who benefit from moderate warming. Global warming has so far cut heating bills more than it has raised cooling bills. If it resumes after its current 17-year hiatus, and if the energy efficiency of our homes improves, then at some point the cost of cooling probably will exceed the cost of heating — probably from about 2035, Prof Tol estimates.
The greatest benefit from climate change comes not from temperature change but from carbon dioxide itself. It is not pollution, but the raw material from which plants make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats. As it is an extremely rare trace gas in the air — less than 0.04 per cent of the air on average — plants struggle to absorb enough of it. On a windless, sunny day, a field of corn can suck half the carbon dioxide out of the air. Commercial greenhouse operators therefore pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses to raise plant growth rates.

‘The foxes round here are so urban that they go to the country at weekends.’

The increase in average carbon dioxide levels over the past century, from 0.03 per cent to 0.04 per cent of the air, has had a measurable impact on plant growth rates. It is responsible for a startling change in the amount of greenery on the planet. As Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University has documented, using three decades of satellite data, 31 per cent of the global vegetated area of the planet has become greener and just 3 per cent has become less green. This translates into a 14 per cent increase in productivity of ecosystems and has been observed in all vegetation types.
Dr Randall Donohue and colleagues of the CSIRO Land and Water department in Australia also analysed satellite data and found greening to be clearly attributable in part to the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect. Greening is especially pronounced in dry areas like the Sahel region of Africa, where satellites show a big increase in green vegetation since the 1970s.
It is often argued that global warming will hurt the world’s poorest hardest. What is seldom heard is that the decline of famines in the Sahel in recent years is partly due to more rainfall caused by moderate warming and partly due to more carbon dioxide itself: more greenery for goats to eat means more greenery left over for gazelles, so entire ecosystems have benefited.
Even polar bears are thriving so far, though this is mainly because of the cessation of hunting. None the less, it’s worth noting that the three years with the lowest polar bear cub survival in the western Hudson Bay (1974, 1984 and 1992) were the years when the sea ice was too thick for ringed seals to appear in good numbers in spring. Bears need broken ice.
Well yes, you may argue, but what about all the weather disasters caused by climate change? Entirely mythical — so far. The latest IPCC report is admirably frank about this, reporting ‘no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency offloads on a global scale … low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms’.
In fact, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, according to a careful study by the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Not because weather has become less dangerous but because people have gained better protection as they got richer: witness the remarkable success of cyclone warnings in India last week. That’s the thing about climate change — we will probably pocket the benefits and mitigate at least some of the harm by adapting. For example, experts now agree that malaria will continue its rapid worldwide decline whatever the climate does.
Yet cherry-picking the bad news remains rife. A remarkable example of this was the IPCC’s last report in 2007, which said that global warming would cause ‘hundreds of millions of people [to be] exposed to increased water stress’ under four different scenarios of future warming. It cited a study, which had also counted numbers of people at reduced risk of water stress — and in each case that number was higher. The IPCC simply omitted the positive numbers.
Why does this matter? Even if climate change does produce slightly more welfare for the next 70 years, why take the risk that it will do great harm thereafter? There is one obvious reason: climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting wood for coal in power stations — all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change — have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities. To name just some of the effects. Mr Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In this country, 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.
As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, the European Union will pay £165 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for the next 87 years. Britain’s climate policies — subsidising windmills, wood-burners, anaerobic digesters, electric vehicles and all the rest — is due to cost us £1.8 trillion over the course of this century. In exchange for that Brobdingnagian sum, we hope to lower the air temperature by about 0.005˚C — which will be undetectable by normal thermometers. The accepted consensus among economists is that every £100 spent fighting climate change brings £3 of benefit.
So we are doing real harm now to impede a change that will produce net benefits for 70 years. That’s like having radiotherapy because you are feeling too well. I just don’t share the certainty of so many in the green establishment that it’s worth it. It may be, but it may not.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9057151/carry-on-warming/

Obamacare's Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are

The Apothecary, With Avik Roy

Insights into health care and entitlement reform.

Obamacare's Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are

Avik Roy, Contributor

The Healthcare.gov website requires that individuals looking for coverage enter personal information before comparing plans. IT experts believe that this requirement is causing the website to crash.

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.
HHS didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs
“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.” (Emphasis added.)
As you know if you’ve been following this space, Obamacare’s bevy of mandates, regulations, taxes, and fees drives up the cost of the insurance plans that are offered under the law’s public exchanges. A Manhattan Institute analysis I helped conduct found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people.
That raises an obvious question. If 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?
Political objectives trumped operational objectives
The answer is that Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions.
But the laws’ supporters and enforcers don’t want you to know that, because it would violate the President’s incessantly repeated promise that nothing would change for the people that Obamacare doesn’t directly help. If you shop for Obamacare-based coverage without knowing if you qualify for subsidies, you might be discouraged by the law’s steep costs.
So, by analyzing your income first, if you qualify for heavy subsidies, the website can advertise those subsidies to you instead of just hitting you with Obamacare’s steep premiums. For example, the site could advertise plans that cost “$0″ or “$30″ instead of explaining that the plan really costs $200, and that you’re getting a subsidy of $200 or $170. But you’ll have to be at or near the poverty line to gain subsidies of that size; most people will either not qualify for a subsidy, or qualify for a small one that, net-net, doesn’t make up for the law’s cost hikes.
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.
Subsidy verification created a traffic bottleneck
Comparable private-sector e-commerce sites, like eHealthInsurance.com, allow you to shop for plans and compare prices simply by entering your age and your ZIP code. After you’ve selected a plan you like, you fill out an on-line application. That substantially winnows down the number of people who rely on the site for network-intensive tasks.
The federal government’s decision to force people to apply before shopping, Weaver and Radnofsky write, “proved crucial because, before users can begin shopping for coverage, they must cross a busy digital junction in which data are swapped among separate computer systems built or run by contractors including CGI Group Inc., the healthcare.gov developer, Quality Software Services Inc., a UnitedHealth Group Inc. unit; and credit-checker Experian PLC. If any part of the web of systems fails to work properly, it could lead to a traffic jam blocking most users from the marketplace.”
Jay Angoff, a former federal official at the agency that oversees the exchange, told the Journal that he was surprised by the decision. “People should be able to get quotes” without entering all of that information upfront.

Weaver and Radnofsky say that the core problem stems from “the slate of registration systems [that] intersect with Oracle Identity Manager, a software component embedded in a government identity-checking system.” The main Healthcare.gov web page collects information using the CGI Group technology. Then that data is transferred to a system built by Quailty Software Services. QSS then sends data to Experian, the credit-history firm. But the key “identity management system” employed by QSS was designed by Oracle, and according to the Journal’s sources, the Oracle software isn’t playing nicely with the other information systems.
Oracle hotly denies these claims. “Our software is the identical product deployed in most of the world’s most complex systems…our software is running properly,” said an Oracle spokeswoman in a statement.
‘It’s awful, just awful’
Robert Pear and colleagues at the New York Times have a piece up today detailing the serious problems with the federal exchange, problems that may get worse, not better. They confirm what we already knew: that the Obama administration refused to delay the implementation of the exchanges, despite the well-known problems, because they were afraid of the political blowback. “Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.”
As I documented last week, IT and insurance experts have been saying for at least eight months that implementation of the exchanges was going badly, that as early as February officials were warning of a “third world experience.” The Times’ sources are just as blunt. “These are not glitches,” said one insurance executive. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our [conference calls with the administration], people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’”
“We foresee a train wreck,” said another executive in a February interview with the Times. “We don’t have the IT specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.” Richard Foster, the former chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said last week that “so much testing of the new system was so far behind schedule, I was not confident it would work well.”
Henry Chao, the deputy chief information officer at CMS who made the “third world experience” comment, was told by his superiors that failure to meet the October 1 launch deadline “was not an option,” according to the Times.
White House knowingly chose to court disaster
Think about it. It’s quite possible that much of this disaster could have been avoided if the Obama administration had been willing to be open with the public about the degree to which Obamacare escalates the cost of health insurance. If they had, then a number of the problems with the exchange’s software architecture would never have arisen. But that would require admitting that the “Affordable Care Act” was not accurately named.
The White House knew that its people on the front lines, people like Henry Chao, were worried that the exchanges would get botched. They saw the Congressional Research Service memorandum detailing that the administration has missed half of the statutory deadlines assigned by the law. But they were more afraid of the P.R. disaster of disclosing Obamacare’s high premiums than they were of the P.R. disaster of crashing websites. What you see is the result.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs/

Friday, October 25, 2013

No, Republican governors are not why Healthcare.gov is a disaster

By HUGH HEWITT

Topics: Obamacare Republican Party Democratic Party Governor Health Care 2014 Elections Conservatism Liberalism

There's a new meme emerging from the Manhattan-Beltway media elite as the collapse of the Obamacare rollout accelerates: The GOP governors did it.

If Republican leadership learned anything from last week's political Dunkirk, it is that they have to message more effectively and continually.

Part of messaging includes rebutting pernicious myths and outright lies. Huge whoppers from the left must be strangled in their infancy, and the "blame GOP governors" is one of them.

The attempt to transfer blame for the exchange debacle runs like this:

"The state-run exchanges are working." (Partially true. Some are working. Some aren't. Only Washington state's exchange seems to function well, but that is a relative measure vis-a-vis the steaming pile of exchange fails, especially the feds, so we don't even know if the Evergreen State's billboard dating service for consumers and insurance company plans is really a success.)

"Many Republican governors refused to build their own exchanges." (True — and a very wise choice by them.)

"Therefore the failure of the federal exchange is the fault of those GOP governors."

What? Non-sequitor alert. This is an absurd jump from a partially true statement and a true statement to a wholly non-logical statement, and done in a way to make it appear syllogistic. No attempt is made to fill in the blank of "Why does the third statement follow?"

“The reason for all of this is completely political," Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health, a consulting company, offered on Fox Business. "Governors, like Rick Perry of Texas ... chose to have the feds run their state's health exchanges."

Perry and most other GOP governors chose not to run interference for a program almost certain to fail and do so so miserably.

Most governors also made the rational economic choice not to expand Medicaid because for most of them the huge costs of doing so will cripple their states in the out-years after the federal bribe to expand runs out.

(A handful of states like Ohio with vast new revenues coming online from oil and gas development can afford to do so.)

Thus GOP governors are also getting blamed for the failure of Obamacare to deliver on its impossible promise to provide coverage for most of the poor.

The fallacy of these arguments doesn't prevent their repetition and the enormity of the Obamacare fail is such that many friends of the president in the MSM are peddling these absurd analyses.

They are doing so despite the same Supreme Court decision they are so fond of citing as "upholding Obamacare" -- a decision that struck down the attempt to force-feed the doomed Medicaid expansion down the throats of all the states, and not merely the willing.

Thus will Team Obama and its minor league franchises in the MSM attempt to transfer blame for the most massive and obviously-so display of governmental incompetence in many decades.

The GOP cannot stand by and assume that voters will understand that this is utter claptrap. The leaders have to say so, everywhere and often.

Sadly, there is no reason to expect that they will, and next fall when Democratic candidates for Congress are blasting GOP governors for the misery of people who lost their insurance and are locked out of their old plans, the Republicans will stutter, "But, but, but ... we had nothing to do with that."

And voters won't believe them because, after all, who would have let such a lie fester?

HUGH HEWITT, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/no-republican-governors-are-not-why-healthcare.gov-is-a-disaster/article/2537464

ObamaCare's Black Box--Why the exchanges are worse than even the critics imagined.

ObamaCare's Black Box

Why the exchanges are worse than even the critics imagined.

The White House set low expectations for the Affordable Care Act's October 1 debut, so anything remotely competent should have seemed like a success. But three weeks on, the catastrophe that is Healthcare.gov and the 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government is an insult to the "glitches" President Obama said were inevitable.
This isn't some coding error, or even the Health and Human Service Department's usual incompetence. The failures that have all but disabled ObamaCare are the result of deliberate political choices, which HHS and the White House are compounding with secrecy and stonewalling.

***

The health industry and low-level Administration officials warned that the exchanges were badly off schedule and not stress-tested despite three years to prepare and more than a half-billion dollars in funding. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her planners swore they'd be ready while impugning critics and even withholding documents from the HHS inspector general for a routine performance audit this summer.
Yet the launch has been worse even than critics predicted. The rare users who weren't locked out experienced crashes, delays and error messages. Mrs. Sebelius initially claimed this was merely servers crashing under unexpectedly high demand. She called it "a great problem to have."

Enlarge Image

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Associated Press

Now that traffic has abated, HHS concedes there were built-in information technology and structural defects. Some of Healthcare.gov's automatic operations mimic hacker denial-of-service attacks meant to disable a site. These can be fixed, though press reports suggest they're due to a programming rush because HHS delayed key regulations and IT specifications until after the election to avoid Republican criticism.
Then instead of rolling out the program in stages or delaying it as HHS has so many other parts of the law, the department simply dumped a bad product on the public to meet a self-created deadline.
Other failures have the same political character. Consumers must set up a complex account with sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers before they are allowed to browse health plans. The government wants to show consumers only their net out-of-pocket premiums minus subsidies, not the true underlying cost of insurance. That's because those all-in quotes are so much higher than what's available on the individual market.
HHS continues to claim that the exchanges are all about competition—they're even trying to rebrand them as "marketplaces." But real marketplaces are transparent and let consumers know what they get for what price. ObamaCare's exchanges are intended to obscure price and service options.
HHS still refuses to disclose how much taxpayers shelled out for this exchange lemon. The money came from several ObamaCare, general HHS and Medicare accounts and flowed to more than 50 outside vendors, with several no-bid contracts awarded outside the normal procurement process.
Mrs. Sebelius also refuses to reveal basic data about ObamaCare enrollment even as she brags about the millions of people who have supposedly visited Healthcare.gov. Information that would allow outsiders to evaluate the exchanges includes how many people have applied and qualified for coverage so far, what types of health plans they're selecting and what their health risks are.
Mrs. Sebelius claims she doesn't know the answers and that the government will pull such information together in November. Given the farce so far, it makes sense that the CEO of ObamaCare can't or isn't monitoring its day-to-day operations. But this claim is almost certainly false.
The states running their own exchanges report enrollment more regularly, which ranges from the low thousands in big states like California to a single person so far in Delaware. Literally, one. And the HHS-run exchanges are designed to make daily reports, seven days a week.
These reports are known in industry jargon as 834 transactions and they may represent the most serious ObamaCare breakdown. Insurers and the exchanges are supposed to swap electronic files every 24 hours that track the policies consumers select and their subsidies and check their lists against each other. The problem is that the exchanges rarely generate accurate 834s.
Our sources in the insurance industry explain that the 834s so far are often corrupted or in the wrong syntax, and therefore unusable unless processed by hand. In other cases the exchanges spit out multiple 834s enrolling and unenrolling the same user and don't come with time stamps that would allow the insurer to identify the most recent version.
The upshot is that the exchanges, the insurers and the consumers will often have different records on file. These mismatches are an architectural flaw that could persist for years. The administrative-bureaucratic tangle will only become more complex as more people enroll, providers start billing insurers, patients show up in doctors offices thinking they have coverage they don't, and the IRS starts fining Americans for not having insurance.

***

Before the rollout, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Sebelius likened the exchanges to a new Apple product and asked for forbearance as problems were fixed. But Apple doesn't ship products that don't work and then force everyone to buy them, and a private business executive who supervised a fiasco like this would already have been fired.
The crowd in charge of the country that includes Silicon Valley ought to be ashamed that they can't produce a serviceable website in 2013. A useful act of contrition would be to resign, or, failing that, to beg Congress for a year delay to clean up their wreckage

Barack Obama’s Era of Hopelessness

by John Hinderaker in Obama administration

Of all the bitter fruit of the Barack Obama disaster, the most bitter may be the sense of hopelessness that has descended on Americans, especially the young. Has there ever been anything like it in our history? Even on the eve of the Civil War, was there this much pessimism about our future? Gallup wasn’t around in those days, but I wonder.
For a simple measure of how the Obama administration has crushed any sense of hopefulness in the American people, take a look at the survey that Rasmussen Reports does periodically on whether America’s best days are behind her, or still in the future. It’s a great question that tells a lot about how Americans are feeling.
Rasmussen last asked the question before Barack Obama took office in August 2008, while the presidential campaign that resulted in Obama’s election was in progress. The result:

45% of voters think America’s best days lie ahead, while 37% think they have come and gone.

That was after nearly eight years of the supposedly disastrous Bush administration–which, by the way, looks more like a golden age every day, compared with what has followed.

Fast forward to today, after nearly five years of the Obama administration. How are Americans feeling about the future?

31% of Likely U.S. Voters think America’s best days are still to come… Just over half (52%) think the nation’s best days are in the past.

So the Age of Obama has brought the percentage who think America’s best days are still ahead down from 45% to 31%, while the number who think our best days are gone has risen from 37% to 52%. Great work, Barry. This is your true legacy: hopelessness.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/10/barack-obamas-era-of-hopelessness.php

“We must increase our debt limit so that we can pay our bills.”

by John Hinderaker in Debt-ceiling, Federal debt and deficit, Shutdown showdown

As Tyler Durden notes, this is the “most disturbing sentence uttered during the debt ceiling debate/government shut down.” America is now going on $17 trillion in debt, a level of insolvency that would already be regarded as catastrophic if the Fed were not keeping interest rates close to zero.
The federal deficit declined in FY 2013, which ended on September 30. Final numbers are not yet available, but it is estimated that the FY 2013 deficit will be around $650 billion. This represents some improvement: it is the first time during the Obama administration when the deficit has been below $1 trillion.
The declining deficit is due to the election of a Republican House in 2010, which led to the sequester, and to tax increases. But in historical perspective, a $650 billion deficit is nothing to celebrate: the U.S. has never run a deficit anywhere near that big in any fiscal year when Barack Obama was not president. Don’t be fooled by Democrats who try to attribute FY 2009 to George Bush. The Democratic Congress didn’t pass spending bills covering the vast majority of FY 2009 spending until Obama was safely in office, and FY 2009 includes the Obama/Pelosi/Reid “stimulus” spending, with which George Bush, obviously, had nothing to do. The largest deficit of the George W. Bush years was $459 billion, in FY 2008, the year when financial markets collapsed. The largest deficit of the Clinton years was $255 billion; of the George H.W. Bush years, $290 billion; and of the Reagan administration, $221 billion.

Bad as things are, they are likely to get worse: according to CBO projections, the current deficit decline is temporary, and deficits will soon begin to climb again as baby boomers retire and consume untold trillions in Social Security and Medicare benefits. There are around 72 million American children under the age of 18. If you do the math, assuming they are on the hook for our debts, that means that currently, each American child is around $236,000 in debt. Since only around one-half of Americans are federal income taxpayers, it would be more accurate to say that each future taxpayer owes $472,000. If two of them get married, they owe just short of $1 million, with more debt being piled up every day and with interest costs sure to increase.

These numbers can be sliced and diced in various ways, but any way you look it it, it is insane that those in Washington who wanted to blow past the statutory debt limit without hesitation so that we can “pay our bills” are hailed as responsible. Here is a hint: if you have to borrow money to pay your bills, you aren’t paying your bills.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/10/we-must-increase-our-debt-limit-so-that-we-can-pay-our-bills.php