Guest Post: Ten Things to Expect from Obamacare in 2014

Since the arguments about partial government shutdown and debt ceilings were linked to opposition to ObamaCare, I figured some of you might like to know something about it. So here, courtesy of the Casey Daily Dispatch, is Dan Steinhart introducing Dr Elizabeth Lee Vliet to brief you.

Obamacare's health exchanges opened on October 1, with a system so crummy that even the Washington Post is calling it a disaster.

Though Obamacare has been America’s law of the land for 3½ years, this marks its first major milestone that impacts Americans on an individual level. That's because Obama designed his crowning achievement to phase in slowly, over nine years—probably a good idea considering it's a hive of onerous regulations and 20-something new taxes that, if unleashed all at once, would wallop the US economy. Better to boil the frogs slowly.

The next major milestone is approaching fast. On January 1, the individual mandate will take effect, forcing all Americans to either buy health insurance or pay a penalty. Well, almost all Americans. If you happen to be friends with Obama, or a donor, union, or political ally who supports him, you may get a waiver, which you'll read more about below.

Given that the impact of Obamacare will only grow from here on out, I asked Dr. Lee Vliet—physician and acclaimed Obamacare expert—what we should expect as the calendar turns to 2014.

Importantly, Dr. Vliet is independent in every sense of the word. Not only is she an independent physician, she's also a registered political Independent, and has no ties to pharmaceutical, insurance, political, or any other interests. Like any good doctor, she is professionally concerned with one thing and one thing only: her patients. You'll find her criticisms of Obamacare quite harsh, but only because she's disturbed about the impact it will have on her patients…

Ten Things to Expect from Obamacare in 2014
Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D.

It's been clear to anyone paying attention that the October "rollout" of Obamacare has been a turbulent, confusing disaster. Sloppy IT systems and technological failures combined to cripple Obamacare's sign-up systems. Security flaws put Americans at risk for identity theft.

In an almost comical understatement, President Obama summarized these massive failures as "a few glitches." I think that Luke Chung, IT expert and president of database solutions firm FMS, explained the situation much more accurately:

"What should clearly be an enterprise quality, highly scalable software application felt like it wouldn't pass a basic code review. It appears the people who built the site don't know what they're doing, never used it and didn't test it."

Chung went on to call it a "technological disaster."

Think about what this ineptitude means in the bigger debate about Obamacare. The administration spent 3½ years and $698 million of taxpayers' money to develop this software. They've known since earlier this year that the system wasn't ready to support the rollout of the exchanges. Yet they proceeded anyway, apparently unconcerned about their faulty software costing Americans millions of hours of frustration and lost productivity.

These same bureaucrats continue to assume more and more control of our medical care. What does their incompetence say about how they will handle making life-or-death medical care decisions?

Like a parasite taking over its host, Obamacare will commandeer almost 20% of our economy, crowding out private options. With 2014 fast approaching, what should we expect in its next phase?

Here's my list Top Ten list for 2014:

A short quiz on the #DebtCeiling: Who said … ?

Here’s a (very) short quiz on the American Debt Ceiling. Just four questions, the answers to which will make you laugh.

1. Who said about raising the Debt Ceiling, “We can’t just give a blank cheque over and over again”?

2. Who said about raising the Debt Ceiling, “The request sounds like a drunk going to an AA meeting saying, ‘just give me one more drink’”?

3. Who said about raising the Debt Ceiling, “Most Americans know that increasing the debt is the last thing we should be doing”?

4. Who said about raising the Debt Ceiling, “America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership; Americans deserve better”?

You want to know? You really, really want to know?

See, it’s not about economics at all. It’s about politics.

[Hat tip James Woods]

#Shutdown: Who slapped who?

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
  “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
- response attributed to Benjamin Franklin, at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787

It’s fair to say that few commentators on the shutdown appear to know anything at all about the American constitutional structure—and in that number I include the President himself, who seems entirely unaware that the division of powers entrenched by James Madison, John Adams and colleagues was not intended to establish an activist all-powerful presidency, a a virtual monarch presiding over a Congress whose only role being to provide him with an enthusiastic rubber stamp.

The division of powers the founders established was intended to allow dissension, to limit presidential power, to allow proper investigation of Bills written by the House, to delay and/or veto altogether legislation inimical to one branch or other. In short, the division of powers was intended as a check on absolute power. So as Thomas Sowell points out:

It’s what’s *not* shut down that really matters

Robert Tracinksi has both good news, bad news and laughable news about the US government “shutdown.”

The good news is that the US government has shut down.  The laughable news is that most of the “shutdowns” are absurd: “closing” the Grand Canyon for example (“Now there's a statement of the warped metaphysics of “shutdown theatre”: the conceit that even the existence of nature is dependent on federal funding. Without it, the Grand Canyon will close up”); or hiring federal workers to erect barriers around monuments that require no federal workers to remain open.

Bill Clinton long ago perfected [this] art of "shutdown theatre," also known as the Washington Monument Strategy, in which a government shutdown is designed to hit the tourists first—for example, by shutting down the Washington Monument—in order to maximize its visible impact and stampede the public into demanding that House Republicans surrender.
    This time, history is repeating itself as farce, with the Obama administration ordering the "shutdown" of public facilities where there is nothing to shut down. Shutdown theatre has become shutdown theatre of the absurd…

It’s like the an amateur conjurer’s trick, waving his right about to attract your attention while his left hand is picking your pocket. Because

    this shutdown theatre is all just a colourful distraction from the real issue: the fact that the overwhelming majority of government is not shut down by the shutdown.

That’s the bad news.

By [one] calculation, at most 13% of government spending is affected by the "shutdown."

But you want to hear something worse?

Bonus Quote of the Day, on ‘The Shutdown’

Since this is such an auspicious day in North America, what with ObamaCare starting and the federal government’s non-essential services being shut down and all, I figured—what the hell—with such a great teaching moment in front of us, let’s have a bonusly topical Quote of the Day. So here it is.

“Two-thirds of government workers were told to stay at home today because they're considered nonessential. The real tragedy would be if they were told to come back.”
- Jeffrey Tucker, from “Taxes: Man’s Inhumanity to Man”

Shutdown? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

The partial shutdown of the “non-essential” parts of the America’s Federal Government (and if they are truly non-essential then maybe they should be phased out completely) has flushed out a whole firestorm of misunderstanding about the constitutional safeguards originally put in place by the American Founding Fathers, some of it in evidence here over at Russell Brown's place.

The fact is, whatever gamesmanship the Republican Congressreptiles are playing in trading off the Budget over ObamaCare, the reason that there is a partial shutdown and these particular Congressreptiles have been granted the whip hand because of that is because a Budget can’t actually be passed as is where is—and a Budget can’t be passed as it where is because the US Government’s Debt Ceiling is about to breached yet again—and the US Government’s Debt Ceiling is about to be breached again because the US Government is overspending again—and the government  is overspending again and again and again because it has increasingly and dangerously and with malice aforethought taken upon itself the mantle of activist government. 

It has gone far, far past what any of the Founding Fathers would have considered the truly essential services of government.

Which is why, in fact, they put constitutional restraints on government in the first place--in word, in deed, and in the way the American Government is ordered. To constrain their government constitutionally, or try to, to doing only what their government was set up to do, i.e., to protect individual rights.  This was, in fact, one of their primary accomplishments.

The fact to grasp here is that the American constitutional trinity of legislature, executive and judiciary, which is what the Democrat Congressreptiles are whimpering is holding back their latest incursion of non-essential activism-in-government, was not set up to encourage activist government, but explicitly to make it more difficult.  As difficult as it was possible to make it.

Which, given the exponential growth of non-essential activist government in the US since its founding, was clearly not difficult enough. The fact remains however that the difficulties the overspenders now face was constituted intentionally, and with some serious and inspired forethought.

In other words: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

And the reason the Republican Congressreptiles can’t point that out themselves? Because they’re almost as bad at the activist overspending lark as their putative opponents.

‘A Modest Proposal’ on America’s ‘Budget Crisis’

This is not the first ‘Budget Crisis’ faced by the American political classes. Nor is it the first partial shutdown of (some parts of) the US Federal government. By some counts, it’s the 18th.

The Circle Bastiat posted a piece written in 1990 by Murray Rothbard, at the time of that year’s ‘Budget Crisis,’ on the realities of government budget ‘crises’ and how they often seem to end up demanding that the taxpayers “sacrifice” or that the American people join in “fair sharing of the pain.”

In politics autumn, not spring, is the silly season. How many times have we seen the farce: the crises deadline in October, the budget “summit” between the Executive and Congress, and the piteous wails of liberals and centrists that those wonderful, hard-working, dedicated “federal workers” may be “furloughed,” which unfortunately does not mean that they are thrown on the beach to find their way in the productive private sector.
    The dread furlough means that for a few days or so, the oppressed taxpaying public gets to keep a bit more of its own money, while the federal workers get a rare chance to apply their dedication without mulcting the taxpayers: an opportunity that these bureaucrats invariably seem to pass up.
    Has it occurred to many citizens that, for the few blessed days of federal shutdown, the world does not come to an end? That the stars remain in their courses, and everyone goes about their daily life as before?
    I would like to offer a modest proposal, giving us a chance to see precisely how vital to our survival and prosperity is the Leviathan federal government, and how much we are truly willing to pay for its care and feeding. Let us try a great social experiment: for one year, one exhilarating jubilee year, we furlough, without pay, the Internal Revenue Service and the rest of the revenue-gathering functions of the Department of Treasury.
    That is, for one year, suspend all federal taxes and float no public debt, either newly incurred or even for payment of existing interest or principal. And then let us see how much the American public is willing to kick into, purely voluntarily, the public till.
    We make these voluntary contributions strictly anonymous, so that there will be no incentive for individuals and institutions to collect brownie-points from the feds for current voluntary giving. We allow no carryover of funds or surplus, so that any federal spending for the year–including the piteous importuning of Americans for funds–takes place strictly out of next year’s revenue.
    It will then be fascinating to see how much the American public is truly willing to pay, how much it thinks the federal government is really worth, how much it is really convinced by all the slick cons: by the spectre of roads falling apart, cancer cures aborted, by invocations of the “common good,” the “public interest,” the “national security,” to say nothing of the favourite economists’ ploys of “public goods” and “externalities.”
    It would be even more instructive to allow the various anonymous contributors to check off what specific services or agencies they wish to earmark for expenditure of their funds. It would be still more fun to see vicious and truthful competitive advertising between bureaus: “No, no, don’t contribute to those lazy louts in the Department of Transportation (or whatever), give to us.” For once, government propaganda might even prove to be instructive and enjoyable.
    The precedent has already been set: if it is proper and legitimate for President Bush and his administration to beg Japan, Germany, and other nations for funds for our military adventures in the Persian Gulf, why shouldn’t they be forced, at least for one glorious year, to beg for funds from the American people, instead of wielding their usual bludgeon?
    The 1990 furlough crisis highlights some suggestive but neglected aspects of common thinking about the budget. In the first place, all parties are talking about “fair sharing of the pain,” of the “necessity to inflict pain,” etc. How come that government, and only government, is regularly associated with a systematic infliction of pain?
    In contemplating the activities of Sony or Proctor and Gamble or countless other private firms, do we ask ourselves how much pain they propose to inflict upon us in the coming year? Why is it that government, and only government, is regularly coupled with pain: like ham-and-eggs, or . . . death-and-taxes? Perhaps we should begin to ask ourselves why government and pain are Gemini twins, and whether we really need an institution that consists of a massive engine for the imposition and administration of pain and suffering. Is there no better way to run our affairs?
    Another curious note: it is now the accepted orthodoxy of our liberal and centrist establishment that taxes must be raised,  regardless of where we are in the business cycle. So strong is this article of faith that the fact that we are already in a recession (and intelligent observers do not have to wait for the National Bureau of Economic Research to tell us that retroactively) seems to make no dent whatever in the thirst for higher taxes.
    And yet there is no school of economic thought–be it New Classical, Keynesian, monetarist, or Austrian–that advocates raising taxes in a recession. Indeed, both Keynesians and Austrians would advocate cutting taxes in a recession, albeit for different reasons.
    So whence this fanatical devotion to higher taxes? The liberal-centrists profess its source to be deep worry about the federal deficit. But since these very same people, not too long ago, scoffed at worry about the deficit as impossibly Neanderthal and reactionary, and since right now these same people brusquely dismiss any call for lower government spending as ipso facto absurd, one suspects a not very cleverly hidden agenda at work.
    Namely: a love for higher taxes and for higher government spending for their own sake, or, rather, for the sake of expanding statism and collectivism as contrasted with the private sector.
    There is one way we can put our hypothesis to the test: shouldn’t these newfound worriers about the deficit delight in our modest proposal one year with no deficit at all, one year with no infliction of pain whatever?  Wanna bet?

So let’s shut down the govt!

There’s one simple way for the US Government not to be shut down, but it’s the one thing that’s never going to happen:  for the US Government to stop overspending and avoid going over the debt ceiling again.

But that’s just not going to happen, is it. Because both major US political parties are infected with the overspending bacillus.

So, instead of actually stopping the overspending, which is what the existence of a debt ceiling is actually designed to encourage, every form of political flunky in town—like every conjuror offering a lesson in misdirection—wants to talk about something else: about Republican miscalculation, or Democratic intransigence, or compromise, or Obamaesque arrogance, or Boehneresque bullying. Anything, anything at all, just don’t talk about stopping that goddamned overspending!

But you know the one good thing about it all, if the shutdown happens? Perhaps folk will be able to see, as they did in 1996 when this last happened, that having some parts of government shut down does not bring about the end of the world—which may just encourage them start a new one predicated on less government rather than more.

I can hope, can’t I?