Shameless Sleight of Hand

New from the administration of 'hope and change'; sleight of hand in the hope that voters will change the channel from the Obamacare train wreck to the Senate and Iranian nuclear option train wrecks. Oh, and let's not forget the background diversion of immigration reform.

These guys are shameless.

As was predicted by conservatives like me, the paltry number of insurance enrolees (not including the enormous number of new Medicaid enrollees) is heavily skewed toward the 45-65 year-old crowd with a correspondingly lackluster enrollment of younger, healthier people (adverse selection in action). Even the tax of $95/year (or 1% of adjusted gross income) looks good compared to an average premium of $250/month to people unlikely to get sick.

This is happening even in states the liberals tout as huge success stories; California, New York and Connecticut. Of course this makes sense since blue states have a greater addiction to the government teat. It gives me the blues to live in one of them.

I suspect the red state legislatures saw this coming; at least someone read the law!

Although I did not predict the cancellations of millions of policies in the individual, private insurance market since they were to be grandfathered (albeit in a way that was, in hindsight, guaranteed to not apply), I did predict that many employers would use the law as political cover to dump employer-provided insurance plans. Again, the $2-3,000 tax is much less than the premium; at my last job, my employer paid $14,000/year for my wife and me.

This suggests that employers will shed billions of dollars in cost for which taxpayers will have to pay since the actual cost of health services continues to rise unabated. This is why the so-called employer mandate was postponed until after the mid-term elections. In 2017, the taxpayer cost will really kick in.

Given a workforce of 140 million, half of whom don't pay federal income tax, this amounts to more than a $2,000/year tax on those who do pay tax.

This is why the law is backed by many big businesses.

In addition, this paves the way for even higher consumer costs since employer-provided insurance was tax-free but insurance in the private/exchange market will be purchased with after-tax dollars. This, in addition to the other $500 billion in tax hikes that came with Obamacare.

This will, in turn, lead to more calls for minimum wage increases causing an even higher cost of living including health care costs. Need I go on?

So it's no surprise that the President's backers are trying desperately to focus our attention on the other stupid things the administration is doing. It's like they're doing them on purpose.

Of course, the Iran debacle makes Hillary's do-nothing stint at the State Department look excellent compared to rewarding Iran for its continuing efforts to destabilize the Middle East. Hillary looks great...except for Benghazi.

However, we're not all fooled.

I can see that last month's employment numbers were magically boosted by the number of Navigators hired by government to help consumers with the poorly designed website; we learned late last week that 30-40% of it has not even been built yet, let alone tested!

Yep, shameless.