President Obama - as a "get her done Gen Xer"

[Reality Check]

... I respectfully feel that one could also look at Obama himself in regards to how he got Obamacare through Congress (and passed in a way that was likely to pass muster with the Supreme Court). Yes, there was, well, a little bit of the "Chicago way" invoked in how he used a balance of caution and chutzpah to do it, which I feel is an X'er hallmark. Also, I agree with John that there is a potential huge flaw in Obamacare via wage-price controls, but what I respectfully feel was key here was in getting this slippery octopus passed and validated: the wage-price issues will be dealt with (i.e., relaxed) as needed in a politically workable way in the near future, I feel, in order to make Obamacare "work." Yes, once again, it took an X'er to get the big, intractable job done, even if a lot of people curse it or just don't believe it

... —Best regards, Marc

[Reality Check]

I believe we disagree on the premiss your comment is based on. The premiss being: Obamacare actually fixes the things Obama promised to fix.

Obamacare which comprises over 2,000 pages of new legislative law, amends 10s of thousands of pages of pre-existing legislative law, and requires federal government employees to write over 100 thousand pages of federal regulatory law is very difficult to have any kind of intelligent discussion about. Much of the regulatory law remains to be written, so no one truly knows exactly what is in it yet nor does anyone truly know what the true total cost will be. Obamacare will require every man, woman and child to buy an insurance policy meeting federal government specifications, but those specifications are yet to be fully written as part of regulatory law and the Obama administration has already violated the deadlines in the Obamacare law for writing them.

We do how ever know some of the bad things about the law that were mandated in the legislative portion of the law.

Government mandated minimum insurance policies will have deductibles of thousands of dollars per year, compared to the typical employer based policies that limit that to hundreds of dollars per year. Government mandated minimum insurance policies will provide co-pays that are much, much higher than typical employer based policies.

The government mandated policies will both allow, and in many case require discrimination based on age. One age group can be charged multiple times more for insurance than another age group. This is something that is not in the typical employer based insurance policy.

Hard drug addicts must be charged the same amount as perfectly healthy people, but, anyone who smoked cigarettes can be discriminated against by charging them multiple times more than a non smoker.

The problem John has identified with it, if I understand his statements correctly, is that it's cost estimates are nothing but fantasy, and it is entirely unsustainable from a financial point of view.

My own opinion is that it has an even bigger problem. If it works as designed it will totally fail to achieve the benefits Obama promised he would deliver with health care reform. In other words, it simply does not work.

Obama identified rising health care costs as the reasons many good United States manufacturing jobs were being moved overseas.

Obama identified the American peoples need for affordable insurance and quality health care coverage as the main thing to be achieved by Obamacare.

Obamacare, if implemented as designed, will make both of these problems worse, not better.

The Obamacare insurance will be too expensive for the lower middle class people who need it most to afford without massive federal government subsides which the U.S. government will simply be unable to borrow and spend. Thus Obamacare is now, and forever will be, another broken promise to the American people by the U.S. government.

Worse yet, the government's insurance benefits, what the government insurance policy's benefits actually pay for, will do so little, it will be too expensive for the lower middle class to actually be able to get medical care for anything except preventive care. Multi-thousand dollar deductibles will mean only the upper middle class and rich will be able to afford to go to the doctor for an illness. Add to this that tens of millions of employees will be dumped onto these government insurance policies by their employers, because Obama and Federal Law now says the government insurance policies provide "quality health care" by definition. Employers will either downgrade their health care plans to the minimum government requirements (which is now by law "quality health care"), or employers will opt to take the thousands of dollars per year, per employee, incentive Obamacare provides them to dump their employees onto the government run exchanges and have the employees buy their own insurance, with after tax dollars, through the exchanges.

Yet, even Obama admits that if U.S. companies do not continue to pay their employees health care costs Obamacare fails based on excessive costs to the U.S. government which Obamacare does not budget for, nor can the U.S. government borrow the additional tens of Trillions that it would cost. Either U.S. companies dump their employees on a government exchange where the federal government can not afford to pay for them, or they lay them off and move the jobs overseas. Even if employers initially do not layoff the employees, but instead keep them employed and dump them on the government exchanges for their health care, Obamacare provides on going incentives of thousands of dollars per year per employee to the businesses to follow up by laying off the dumped employees in a later year and moving their jobs overseas in a later year. Tens of Millions of Americans each year will either lose their employer based health care insurance or they will lose both their jobs and their employer based health care insurance.

Of course some jobs, mostly poor paying, near minimum wage jobs. Like fast food. Like retail sales. Like janitorial service jobs can not be moved overseas. But these jobs pay so little. that the federal government, through the exchanges, will have promised to pay for the insurance premiums, but the federal government will not have the tens of Trillions of dollars needed to do this. And worse yet the benefits the government insurance will provide will have deductibles and co-pays so high the working poor will not be able to afford to go to a doctor for anything other than preventive care, even if they do have a minimum coverage government insurance policy, which is all the federal government promises to "help" pay for as part of Obamacare.

Obama care encourages employers to shrink, not grow. Companies with 50 employees per year pay no costs per employee under Obamacare. Those over 50 employees pay thousands per employee per year. Negative growth incentives are one of the trade mark features of Obamacare.

Obama care promised to provide interim "affordable health care through state high risk insurance pools" to millions of adults with pre-existing conditions prior to 2014. Billions of dollars were set aside in Obamacare to achieve this, yet virtually no one has taken advantage of it, and almost all of it remains unspent, why? Simple the health insurance is both too expensive to the patient to be affordable and it pays too little of the cost of the medical expenses to make any economic sense for the patient to see any point in buying it In other words it provides neither quality health care nor does it provide affordable insurance, so no one can make a rational decision to buy it. Reality bears this out. Millions of the uninsured with pre-existing conditions are eligible for this insurance. It is in the interest of hospitals and doctors to help them sign up. Yet of the millions of uninsured with pre-existing conditions who are eligible, only a few thousands have signed up. This is not a projection, it is now a historical fact.

It is clear, at least to me, that one of the following two things is true about Obama and the Obamacare law:

1. Obama's intent was not to implement a health care law that was good for America with Obamacare, or,

2. He does not have a clue as to what he is doing.

In either case, Obama, like a typical Generation Xer, chose to lie, violate rules, violate laws and violate the constitution in an attempt to pass and implement Obamacare.

Also, like a typical Generation Xer, he did not believe he would ever be punished for violating rules, violating laws or the violating the constitution.

Thanks to Justice Roberts, he has not yet been held accountable.

According to polls, the Generation Xers' portion of the registered voters, as a group, do not intend to hold him accountable either.

[Marc]

Thanks again for more great analysis, Reality Check. I cannot argue with your analysis of the potential flaws of Obamacare as it stands now, and see the validity of what you state as the "Gen-X ways" of Obama in getting it passed. I could be wrong about this, but what I feel Obama is going to do shortly is allow the massive bitching of the American public to "enable" changes in Obamacare, such as via figuring out a scheme to allow lower-deductible health insurance to be had through employers or authorized exchanges. I definitely don't claim that Obama doesn't make or hasn't made mistakes, but I feel that he did have the smarts to at least get the "basic structure" of a near-universal healthcare program passed, and once having done that, he will then let inexorable forces help shape it into something that works.

Something that makes this workability problematic at this time, of course, is the dire economy and the indebtedness of the US government. As such, it may not be until the next First Turning era that we really see such a workable program produced. The key here, again, is getting the skeleton of such a program passed so that the workable program can be molded from it. Just my opinion there; others, of course, may disagree with me here. Thanks again for sharing; it is, again, appreciated. —Best regards, Marc

[Trevor]

Something I've noticed as well is that every group with political connections is getting out of this. If this is such a great system, shouldn't they be the first to sign on? I have the feeling that there are other parts to this bill that we don't know about yet, unpleasant that are going to bite us in the ass. Not that it matters, since all the crooks will be making money hand over fist.

Here's an idea: if the people who wrote this bill aren't willing to use this themselves, scrap it.

[Marc]

I can appreciate your sentiments, Trevor. Without making judgment on specific merits (or lack thereof) of specific components of Obamacare, what was passed did reflect, I feel, a prototypal Post-Unraveling–era piece of major legislation: get through what you can any way you can, while trying to not piss off the-powers-that-be too much. If for that alone, Obamacare is very worthy of sociological and political study, I humbly feel. —Best regards, Marc