Paul Krugman — fresh off his I’m smarter than you post (I have a few tasty comments in that thread that riled the libs something fierce), says this today in response to the Oregon study:
Fire Insurance Is Worthless!
After all, there’s no evidence that it prevents fires.
But strange to say (as Mark Thoma points out in correspondence), people seem to think it’s a good idea anyway.
I leave the relevance of this thought
Apropos to Alex’s post below, the huge news in the last day is a study from Oregon that looked at the effects of expanding Medicaid. As McCardle points out, the study was done under near ideal circumstances. Oregon could not expand Medicaid to everyone who wanted it, so they created a lottery. Sociologists swooped in and recruited. The result was a study of 6000 people with Medicaid and almost 6000 without. One of the authors … Read more
It comes as no surpise to me that so many people as this Kaiser poll discovers, don’t even know that Obamacare is the law of the land or that the promises of “free or affordable healthcare” are plain bullshit:
A new poll finds that many Americans are confused about the health care overhaul legislation commonly called “Obamacare.” The Kaiser Family Foundation released results of a non-partisan study today finding more than 40 percent did
So one of the keystones of the Obamacare plan is the health insurance exchanges. These are the inventions, borrowed from Romneycare, that will supposedly heal the diseased health insurance market, right? They are the cure to what ails us, right?
Well guess what? In one of the most predictable developments in history, it looks like they’re not going to be ready in time:
Where was the contingency plan?
That’s what Joe Klein asks upon
One of the problems that I encounter in the debate over healthcare reform is that a lot of people simply do not understand what insurance is. Insurance is not a magical money tree that gives you free stuff. It is a way of spreading out risk. It has a secondary function in aggregating purchasing power so that insurance can negotiate prices. But, in the end, insurance will always cost the average person more than paying … Read more
And I have no doubt that Barney’s claim that he told Obama to not push for the government takeover of healthcare seems a lot like this tool is again trying to dazzle people with his bullshit. Monday morning quarterbacking, and a piss poor attempt at it at best:
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said he advised President Obama against taking up health care reform following a special election in 2010 that changed Democrats’ fortunes in the
So the consensus, even among liberals, is that Obamacare did not have a good week at the Supreme Court. It was so bad, in fact, that I heard people speculating that the Solictor General deliberately did a bad job to get it struck down.
Huh?
The thinking is that if Obamacare is struck down, this will pave the way for … a single payer system. Seriously:
In the face of a total strike down,
As I said on Twitter, the Obama’s administration’s ridiculous fight against the ministerial exemption — a fight they lost 9-0 in the Supreme Court — suddenly make sense:
The Obama administration announced today it will wait for a year (coincidentally until after the elections) before requiring religious organizations to comply with an Obamacare mandate that they provide coverage for contraception — including controversial drugs that can abort an early pregnancy.
This started with a
I have a sort of like-dislike relationship with Politifact. I think they are useful for gathering facts and providing background. I actually find their long-form articles, where they hash out the details of claims and allow both sides to make their case, much more illuminating than their offhand ratings, which are a bit arbitrary. They are certainly superior to, say, Media Matters, which unabashedly touts the liberal line. But I do occasionally find they get … Read more
Recently I posted about how the CBO had to downgrade the effects it was claiming for the Patronage Bill. Certain people then proceeded to not just question that this was what happened, while trying to defend this epic trillion dollar failure, but to imply I was purposefully being dishonest about the CBO being dishonest – leaning left in that dishonesty – or the way the LSM reports on this crap. Well, the the usual … Read more
